(PRESIDENTS 1804 CAMPAIGN) Broadside titled Fellow Citizens

Sale 2600 - Lot 186

Price Realized: $ 1,062

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200

(PRESIDENTS--1804 CAMPAIGN.) Broadside titled "Fellow Citizens!" Letterpress broadside, 17 1/4 x 10 inches to sight; dampstaining and soiling mostly restricted to margins, 2 light folds; untrimmed; not examined out of modern frame by Perry Hopf, but an unframed image is available by request. Litchfield, CT, 11 September 1804

Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

This broadside was issued shortly before Connecticut's 1804 state elections--for its representatives in Congress, and for the General Assembly's Council of Assistants. Connecticut did not yet allow direct voting for president; its electors were chosen by the legislature. This state election, then, was the only influence Connecticut's voters would have on the November presidential election. Founding Father Oliver Ellsworth, in a bid for his last political office, was on the slate for the Council.

Thomas Jefferson was seeking re-election to the presidency, and the Louisiana Purchase had given him great popularity, but Connecticut was an exception--they largely stayed true to the principles of Washington and Adams. With strict property requirements to vote, and a tradition of political leaders serving long terms with the backing of the state's elite, Connecticut had recently earned the sarcastic nickname "The Land of Steady Habits," a term which the leaders embraced in this broadside: "They laughed at the steady habits of Connecticut: Yes, we cannot forget that this impious faction attempted to laugh us out of our steady habits, the pillars of our welfare here and hereafter!"

The broadside reflects an era before the formal institution of American political parties, but it contains a full dose of the partisan politics to come. It was issued by what we now call the Federalist Party. Although that term is nowhere to be seen here, a resolution by the "Federal Freemen of this State" is included. Vitriol is poured upon what we now call the Democratic-Republican Party, although for the most part they are here dismissed simply as "the faction."

The incumbent president Thomas Jefferson is mentioned only once by name, in a passage mocking the state's Democratic-Republican politicians, who "ask you to vote for men who are in favor of Mr. Jefferson, or who are in favor of liberty of conscience, or universal suffrage, or for a new Constitution; it comes to the same request, and is in plain English, 'will you put me or us into office?'" Jefferson's political appointees to local positions are also critiqued: "the Executive of the United States has thought it fit to select some of the most profligate of the Leaders of this Faction for offices of great trust and emolument among us and . . . has brought vice from its lurking places." The Federalist presidential candidate Charles Pinckney, whose support is being obliquely sought here, is not mentioned by name at all.

The Federalist slate took Connecticut in the September election, in both Litchfield County and the state as a whole. In the November presidential election, they gave the state's 9 votes to Jefferson's opponent Pinckney--which accounted for more than half of Pinckney's total, as Jefferson won re-election in a landslide.

No other examples traced at auction, one other found in OCLC (Connecticut Historical Society).