?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
(SLAVERY AND ABOLITION.) Linen abolitionist handbag in support of the "Negro Woman who sittest pining in captivity." Linen bag, 8 x 8 1/4 inches, printed in ink on both sides; minor foxing and soiling, light horizontal fold, drawstring coming through inner lining. [England, circa 1825?]
One side features an engraving of a seated enslaved woman with a baby. The other side features an unattributed quotation from "Hymns in Prose, for Children" by Anna Leticia Barbauld, first published in 1781 and quoted many times by abolitionists through the early 19th century: "Negro Woman who sittest pining in captivity and weepest over thy sick child though no one seeth thee. God seeth thee though no one pitieth thee. God pitieth thee; raise thy voice forlorn and abandoned one; call upon him from amidst thy bonds for assuredly He will hear thee." This bag is undated, but a small number of bags with similar designs survive in museum collections. A silk bag with this exact design is at the Library of the Religious Society of Friends in England, tracing back to an English owner circa 1820. The Friends' Intelligencer of 21 March 1903 mentions a similar purse brought back from England in 1825.
