The Slave’s Friend, No. 3.

[New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836]. For sale at the Anti-Slavery Office, 144 Nassau-street. 32mo (4.25” x 2.75”) booklet, green wrappers. 16 pp., 5 woodcut illus., ink inscription on front cover: “Lydia & Gardner’s Book.” Gardner’s name repeated in ink on p. 1. CONDITION: Good +, wrappers worn and chipped with 2” separation at spine; wear to edges and light foxing throughout.

This issue of The Slave’s Friend comprises eleven short pieces, including “Stolen Children,” “The Poor Mother,” “Little Julia,” “The Boy and the Dog,” and “What Can We Do?” Though it is marked for sale, this, like many of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s publications, was distributed for free as part of their massive postal campaign to inundate southern states with abolitionist literature. Advances in printing technology and cheap postage enabled the AASS to launch its campaign, and it may have been partly the “sheer novelty” of the postal barrage that sparked such strong negative reactions across the South, including, notably, the attack on the post office of Charleston, South Carolina in 1835, which was followed by a public burning of abolitionist literature and effigies of William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur Tappan, and another abolitionist.

OCLC offers a succinct history of the journal: “The Slave's Friend was a monthly magazine for youth published 1836–1838 by the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833 by noted abolitionist and philanthropist William Lloyd Garrison. It was designed to promote anti-slavery feelings by depicting the horrors of slavery through poems, narratives and dialogues.”

REFERENCES: Wyly-Jones, Susan. “The 1835 Anti-Abolition Meetings in the South: A New Look at the Controversy over the Abolition Postal Campaign,” Civil War History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (2001): p. 299.