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Anti-Slavery Tracts. No. 9. New Series. The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act: an Appeal to the Legislators of Massachusetts.
Boston: Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860. 12mo (7.25” x 4.5”), self-wrappers. 36 pp. CONDITION: Very good, faint central vertical fold, very light foxing to wrappers, .5” to outer leaf at spine hinge. A forceful appeal to the legislature of Massachusetts by an important abolitionist and feminist activist, urging noncompliance with the Fugitive Slave Act in the wake of several bitterly controversial arrests of escaped slaves in Boston. The “New Series” anti-slavery tracts were issued by the American Anti-Slavery Society between 1860 and 1862, four years after publishing their first series between 1855 and 1856. The tract offered here, by AASS newspaper editor Lydia Maria Child, contains numerous vivid and heart-wrenching stories of those escaping slavery and seeking to build lives in Massachusetts (some of whom are named, including Ellen and William Craft, Thomas Sims, and Anthony Burns). Child condemns the failure of the state of Massachusetts to rebuff the inhuman burden placed on it by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: “What says Massachusetts, with the free blood of the Puritans coursing in her veins, and with the sword uplifted in her right hand, to procure ‘peaceful repose under liberty’? Massachusetts answers: ‘O yes. We will be your blood-hounds, and pay our own expenses. Only prove to our satisfaction that the stranger who has taken refuge among us is one of the men you have agreed among yourselves to whip into working without wages, and we will hunt him back for you. Only prove to us that this woman, who has run away from your harem, was bought for a concubine…and our soldiers will hunt her back with alacrity.’ Shame on my native State! Everlasting shame!” A discussion of the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, testimonies against it, and several anti-slavery poems fill the final pages, and Vermont’s 1858 “Personal Liberty Law. An Act to secure Freedom to All Persons within this State” closes the volume, evidently as an example for Child’s native state to follow. Lydia Maria Child (née Francis, 1801–1880) was born in Medford, Massachusetts and was first published as a young woman, beginning with novels, children’s texts (her monthly Juvenile Miscellany running for eight years), and her most successful Frugal Housewife. She and her husband David Lee Child (m. 1828) were early readers of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, and she became a significant activist for both women’s rights and abolition, as well as Indigenous rights. She organized the first Anti-Slavery Fair in Boston in 1834, edited the American Anti-Slavery Society’s National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1840. She edited and prefaced Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the same year that this pamphlet was issued. An anti-slavery tract by leading abolitionist and feminist organizer Lydia Maria Childs, making the case for the moral “duty” of defying the Fugitive Slave Act a year before the outbreak of the Civil War.
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