Apr 27, 2017 - Sale 2444

Sale 2444 - Lot 97

Price Realized: $ 2,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(CIVIL WAR.) The Arch Traitor! Extract from a Soul-Stirring Article in Yesterday's Sunday Mercury. Letterpress broadside, 35 x 25 inches; worn with substantial loss, tastefully conserved and backed, with parts of some letters in the headline restored. [New York, April 1861]

Additional Details

A vicious attack by a newspaper on a rival, issued in the raw first days of the war. This advertising broadside by the New York Sunday Mercury boasts of their previous day's attack on the New York Herald. During the recent Confederate siege of Fort Sumter which had launched the war, the Democratic-leaning Herald had apparently "with diabolical ingenuity and a malignity to earn the curse of God and man alike, pointed out every conceivable point of weakness in the cherished Fort Sumter, and instructed Treason where to strike." This is followed by a call for the lynching of the Herald's Scottish-born publisher James Gordon Bennett, though he is not named, with a "demand that this infamous Scotch ingrate should be peremptorily brought to a sense of the penalty his intolerable villainy is surely earning. His worthless life is nothing in value. . . . The people on whose credulity and money he has so long fattened are beginning to speak ominously of a dungeon for slanderers, and hemp for traitors. Let us thank God he is not an American!" This broadside wins the prize for the most overheated rhetoric we have seen so far this year. One copy in OCLC, none others traced.