Mar 20 at 10:30 AM - Sale 2697 -

Sale 2697 - Lot 14

Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
(ABOLITION.) Turn Out! Turn Out!! No Compromise with Slavery!!! Letterpress broadside, 6¼ x 10¼ inches; vertical fold, minor foxing and edge wear, 2-inch closed tear. Oswego, NY, 3 May 1850
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Additional Details

This broadside invites the citizens of an upstate New York town to a meeting protesting the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act which were then working their way through Congress. The meeting was called by five members of Oswego's small Black community, at least two of them being fugitive slaves themselves. They invited white abolitionists to join them:

"A meeting of the colored citizens of the City of Oswego (and all others who will, may come to the rescue,) will be held at the Bethel Church (Colored) . . . to express their views on Mason's Compromise bill, and the surrender of fugitive slaves."

Oswego, a small city on Lake Ontario, was an abolitionist center which would soon host the National Liberty Party convention in 1852. Famed abolitionist Gerrit Smith from nearby Utica founded the city's library.

Among the five committee members who signed in type, Charles Smith and Tudor Elandor Grant worked together as barbers in the city's Buckout-Jones Building; they were both fugitive slaves from Maryland. Grant's son George later became the first Black professor at Harvard. Along with Smith and Grant, Henry Gray (another Maryland-born barber) was a founding trustee of the First A.M.E. Church of Oswego. Jackson Moore was a Kentucky-born barber who lived with Gray's family at the time of the 1850 census. Stephen Dickens (here "Dickus"), another barber, was the leading Black property owner in town per the 1850 census; the 1850 census lists his birthplace as New York. See Wellman, "This Side of the Border: Fugitives from Slavery in Three Central New York Communities," in New York History 79:4 (1998), pages 375, 379-382.

No other examples traced in OCLC, at auction, or elsewhere.

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