SUMNER, Charles.
The Anti-Slavery Enterprise: its Necessity, Practicability, and Dignity, With Glimpses at the Special Duties of the North. An Address before the People of New York, At the Metropolitan Theatre, May 9, 1855.
Boston: Ticknor and Fields , 1855.
$12,500.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152036
+$450
"The inauguration of freedom...on this I take my stand": First Separate Edition of Charles Sumner's The Anti-Slavery Enterprise
Rare first separate edition of one of the most famous speeches by Sumner, "the most outspoken foe of slavery in the U.S. Senate." Octavo, bound in period-style half sheep over marble covered boards with gilt titles to the spine on a morocco label, marbled endpapers. In near fine condition, signature to the title page.
On May 9, 1855 Charles Sumner delivered this address, one of his most famous, in New York City's Metropolitan Theatre. Here Sumner, "the most outspoken foe of slavery in the U.S. Senate" (Foner, Fiery Trial, xviii), attacks proslavery arguments based on the "practicability" of slavery and especially targets "the alleged distinction of race" and the "alleged sanction of Slavery by Christianity." In one of the work's many eloquent passages, he proclaims: "Power divorced from right is devilish; power without the check of responsibility is tyrannical." In answer to public demand, Sumner then delivered the speech in "Niblo's Theatre and in Brooklyn... The address was warmly praised in the newspapers, and it was printed in full in the New York Tribune and the National Era... This address and... The Barbarism of Slavery make together the most complete forensic argument for the antislavery enterprise which was made during the entire contest." William Lloyd Garrison immediately praised it as "a true, old-fashioned antislavery discourse" and the New York Tribune agreed, saying it "marks the epoch of a revolution in popular feeling; it is an era in the history of Liberty'" (Shotwell, Life, 299). One year later, almost to the day, Sumner addressed Congress in another fierce attack on proslavery supporters with his speech, The Crime Against Kansas. On May 22 an enraged Representative Brooks of South Carolina approached Sumner and, in one of the most notorious moments in congressional history, attacked and beat Sumner with his cane. "His wounds were so serious as to cause him to remain absent from the Senate for more than three years, while Massachusetts kept his seat vacant as a symbol of his martyrdom... Finally, by late 1859, he was well enough to resume his Senate duties... No amount of physical or verbal abuse from slaveholders could keep him silent in his single-minded crusade against their way of life" (ANB). At Sumner's death in 1874 there was such "an outpouring of feeling that, in the history of the Republic, only President Lincoln's assassination had been met with greater public mourning" (Taylor, Young Charles Sumner, 2).
The Anti-Slavery Enterprise: its Necessity, Practicability, and Dignity, With Glimpses at the Special Duties of the North. An Address before the People of New York, At the Metropolitan Theatre, May 9, 1855.
$12,500.00
In Stock
