Sep 30, 2021 - Sale 2580

Sale 2580 - Lot 140

Price Realized: $ 1,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(ILLINOIS.) Great Anti-Nebraska Convention, for the Military Tract will be Held at Galesburg. Letterpress broadside, 24 1/2 x 17 inch broadside; wear at intersection of folds, offsetting, moderate loss and tears at margins not affecting text. Chicago: Worrell, 26 October 1854
Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

The great political debate of 1854 was over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the potential admission of two new slave-owning states into the Union. This threat galvanized the abolitionists into action and helped to spark the Civil War. This broadside advertises a protest meeting in the "Military Tract" of western Illinois, so called because the land had originally been given out to War of 1812 veterans. The two featured speakers were prominent abolitionist lecturers and "champions of freedom." Joshua Reed Giddings (1795-1864) was a United States Congressman from Ohio, and Ichabod Codding (1810-1866) was a Congregational minister: "Let all the people, far and near, come and make this a great day for Freedom."

Ex-Congressman Abraham Lincoln did not speak at this event, but raised his political profile at similar Anti-Nebraska meetings across the state--just ten days earlier he had notably faced off against the bill's mastermind Stephen Douglas in Peoria on 16 October, in a prelude to the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858.

2 copies in OCLC (Yale and Lincoln Presidential Library), and none at auction.