ABOLITIONIST CIVIL WAR ERA WALLET DIARY POWDER HORN ANTISLAVERY 19TH c. ephemera

Description

Here is an extraordinary window into nineteenth-century
Protestant abolitionist thought before the Civil War
.  You are bidding on trifold leather satchel or wallet with alphabetized sections containing the original contents filed by a 19th century Unitarian abolitionist from New England. It's not a written diary but a collection that tells a story. Indeed, the contents, both newspaper clippings and handwritten notes, constitute an intellectual history of the Protestant arm of the abolitionist movement in Boston and environs.  The newspaper clippings (often portions of newspaper columns), are arranged in no discernible order and include discussion of the Fugitive Slave Bill, religious controversies of the 1850s, anti-Catholic squibs, allusions to the growing Temperance movement; promotion of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
, the controversy over slavery in the territory of Kansas, the Election of 1856, the Free-Soilers, and the Whigs who moved toward the new Republican Party  There are references to an 1843 speech by Edward Everett, then the United States minister to England; an 1856 article reprinting a July 5, 1856 letter from Massachusetts Governor Gardner to Alabama Governor Winston in response to Winston’s desire that “we desire no further intercourse with your state” following resolutions passed in Massachusetts regarding the future of
the Kansas territory
.  (At the time, tensions were boiling over in the United States regarding the expansion of slavery. You will recall that Senator Charles Sumner delivered his famous “Bleeding Kansas” speech in May, shortly after which South Carolina’s pro-slavery congressman Preston Brooks beat Sumner senseless); a brief article listing “The Age of the States” ending with Iowa in 1849; a column (likely cut from William Lloyd Garrison’s LIBERATOR) in which one side contains advertisements for UNCLE TOM’S CABIN by John P. Jewett, the first publisher of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 antislavery book, and the other side prints a poem dedicated to one of the book’s African American characters, Topsy:
“Topsy, or the Slave Girl’s Appeal:  To the Visitors and Patrons of the Antislavery Bazaar, to be held in Boston, U.S., in the Twelfth Month (DEC.) 1852”
– signed “Bolton, England, Oct. 19, 1852”); a lengthy 1857 article titled “Free Labor in the Danish West Indies” published in a Boston Unitarian newspaper; a poem titled “The Baptism” by N.P. Willis (Nathaniel Parker Willis, 1806-1867, the famed author for whom the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs once worked); a remarkable and lengthy August 30, 1856, letter by the famed Josiah Quincy III  printed in two columns and titled, “Remarks on the Letter of the Hon. Rufus Choate to the "’Whig State Committee of Maine,’ Written in Answer to a Letter of the Hon. John Z. Goodrich” (Choate was opposed to the new Republican Party while Quincy supported Fremont and condemned the slave states);  a brief – and clearly anti-Catholic – article titled “Protestant Baptism in Rome”; a small clipping titled “Census of Cities of the United States in 1850”; a September 15, 1851 printing of a poem titled “Doggerels for Dogs”; a small clipping titled “Doctor’s Visits”; a February 4, 1854 column from the EVENING TRANSCRIPT titled “Religious Sects in England”; a very small clipping titled “Educate! Educate!” about criminals’ lack of education; a brief article about the “Monument to Hon. Samuel Hoar,” the
antislavery Whig
(and later Republican) who co-founded the Massachusetts Free Soil Party; an article titled, “The Demon of Haste” (two columns pinned together); an article titled “Calvin on the Fire and the Worm”; a small clipping printing a poem titled, “To a Lady, Who Complained that her Heart had Lost its Youth” by N.L. Frothingham, D.D. (the Unitarian minister);  a brief article titled, “The German Goethe” agreeing with “the Rev. Mr. Putnam[’s]” condemnation of Goethe; a brief article “A Beautiful Reflection”; a very brief article titled “A Christian Idol” (another anti-Catholic writing); an 1854 article identifying European libraries by the number of volumes held;  a brief 1850 article condemning the Fugitive Slave bill adjacent to an article about problems with the port of San Francisco – on the other side is a reprinted article about Jenny Lind, the opera singer; a reprinted poem titled “Wilt Thou Love Her Still by C.S.”; a clipping that begins, “Rev. Wm. P. Lunt, D.D., of Quincy, then recited the following brilliant lines, which were received with signal tokens of approbation”; a brief article “Gas and Popery” reprinted “From the Gas Journal of 1850” (another anti-Catholic squib); portions of a series of
articles (No I, No. II, No. III, Part IV, and No X) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
(signed H.B.S.), all titled “Shadows on the Hebrew Mountains” (an online check suggests that these were published in THE INDEPENDENT, Vol. 6, in 1854); a brief article “The Grog Shops of Boston” quoting a report stating that “The whole number of places in the city where liquor is sold is 1500” and providing details by ward; a reprinted poem titled “Song of the Electric Telegraph” by E.L. Blanchard; an article titled “The Telegraph in Europe”; a tiny article identifying all the states “prohibiting the sale of intoxicating drinks”; an article titled “New England Doctrine of Atonement” regarding the mid-nineteenth century controversy over the liberal theology of Congregational minister Horace Bushnell.
The small
handwritten pages
consist of a variety of what appear to be reading notes.  I don’t know whether the owner of the wallet was a minister, a teacher, or a student but the subjects of these brief notes range from religious history to Tertullian; a recipe “For a Cough” cure; Charles I (a later owner of the note on Charles I seems to have transcribed the note below it from cursive to block letters); a transcription of a passage from Horace Mann, the educator and abolitionist, on “Fraud”; a handwritten poem “On the Love of God”; another passage from
Horace Mann
– this one evidently from his 1835 report to the Massachusetts State Senate on “Insolvent Debtors”; a page of notes regarding the U.S. Constitution and articles 1, 7, & 18 of the
Massachusetts state Constitution
; what appear to be notes for (or on) a speech or class titled “Remarks on Books Dec. 18, 1851” (the subject seems to be textbooks in various fields assigned in Massachusetts schools); a quotation from a January 4, 1774 Concord, Mass. document about the boycotting East India tea from Great Britain.
Also included in the lot – from the same estate – is a
brass Union powder horn flask with “E Pluribus Unum” embossed on it
.  Ironically, the powder horn symbolizes -- in a jarring way --the ultimate strength and success of the New England abolitionist movement, which resulted in the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment.