Description: Fiery letter from an unknown party -- likely Benjamin Lundy -- documenting the writer's life, health, farm and finances, but largely devoted to exposition of the letter writer's positions on abolitionism and slavery. Much of the letter is devoted to passionate renunciation of a recent 'Resolution'; and is devoted to persuading the letter's recipients to vote against said resolution. The writer invokes the hypocrisy of a 'glorious Republic' bound up in slavery, and describes the author's frustration with divisions in recent anti-slavery meetings in florid detail and impassioned language. Much of the letter is difficult to transcribe, and this object represents the first four pages of what seems to have been a longer letter. Benjamin Lundy (1789-1839) was a prominent Quaker abolitionist best known for his development of abolitionist periodicals. His Genius of Universal Emancipation was first published in 1821 from his home in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, and enjoyed a wide circulation across the antebellum United States. In the 1820s, the young William Lloyd Garrison came to work for The Genius. Benjamin Lundy traveled widely seeking subscriptions to The Genius, giving talks about the anti-slavery movement, and observing and documenting the conditions of enslaved people across the Americas. He was also involved in the establishment of freed slave colonies in Mexico. View on Ohio Memory.
Image ID: MSS112_B01F02_18500203_01
Subjects: Abolition; Abolitionists; Quakers; Society of Friends; Human rights; Anti-slavery periodicals -- 19th century; Lundy, Benjamin, 1789-1839
Places: Boston (Massachusetts);