Between the Covers

Softcover. First edition. Octavo. 43, [1]pp., printed in two columns. Gathered and stitched self-wrappers. Front wrap presents as a printed letter from George L. Stearns; the rear wrap is an advertisement for a “Radical Republican Journal.” Light creases from handling, very faint foxing; near fine. Pages 36–39 contains this important Frederick Douglass speech, given before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1865.

Douglass argued that the work of the Abolitionists was not yet done. He demanded the “immediate, unconditional and universal” enfranchisement for all black men in the Republic. Voting power, he argued, was what the freedmen needed, for their protection, to truly abolish slavery; to keep its bloody stain from spreading past the end of the Civil War, into the future. Douglass also bridled against the practices of compelling freed slaves to work on plantations to earn their bread and shelter or forcing them to do hard labor by conning and false legal pretenses. He emphatically announced that blacks had proven they could work. Whites should let them either make it on their own or fall on their own. The concluding portion of Frederick Douglass’s speech is powerful:

"‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us… All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, —don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner-table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot-box, let him alone, don’t disturb him!"

Douglass’s speech is followed by “Suffrage for the Blacks Sound Political Economy” by Elizur Wright. George L. Stearns, the publisher, was one of the “Secret Six” who financed and worked with John Brown in his failed attempt to raid Harper’s Ferry. An important Frederick Douglass speech. *Blockson* 2779. *Sabin* 22713.

Item #443795