Feb 21, 2008 - Sale 2137

Sale 2137 - Lot 76

Price Realized: $ 12,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
RARE RECONSTRUCTION CHROMOLITHOGRAPH (SLAVERY AND ABOLITION.) [ELLIOTT, ROBERT B.] The Shackle Broken By the Genius of Freedom. Chromolithograph, 22x26 inches. Large center vignette of Robert B. Elliott speaking before the House of Representatives; surrounded by five smaller vignettes with extensive captions beneath; a larger vignette of black soldiers runs across the top; diagonal faint water-stain in the top left corner, mostly in the blank margins. Baltimore: E. Sachse and Company, 1874
Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

A rare lithograph featuring South Carolina representative Robert B. Elliott (1842-1884). A politician, editor and lawyer, Elliott was elected to the House in 1870 along with three other African Americans and one white man from South Carolina. In 1873, having lost his bid for the Senate, he made a brilliant speech before the House on the new Civil Rights Bill, debating and, by some accounts, easily besting Alexander Stephens the ex-vice-president of the Confederacy. The bill, which guaranteed equal treatment in all places of public accommodation to all people regardless of their "nativity, race, color, or persuasion, religious or political," was passed on March 1, 1875. The debate is memorialized in this chromolithograph.