(SLAVERY AND ABOLITION) POLITICS To Our White Brethren At a

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DIRTY TRICKS (SLAVERY AND ABOLITION.) POLITICS. To Our White Brethren. At a Meeting of the Philadelphia Colored Literary Institute. Political broadside, 9-5/8 x 7-5/8 inches, printed on pale blue-tinted paper. [Philadelphia, 1862]

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A rare piece of political "dirty trickery" from the 1862 Pennsylvania election, produced by the Democrats. To begin with there was no such thing as the "Philadelphia Colored Literary Institute." There was the Banneker Literary Institute of Philadelphia, a colored institute, and for the purposes of the Democratic Party machine, which was to rile up poor whites and especially Irish immigrants, the two sounded close enough. The immigrant Irish would find the wording of the broadside especially rankling: "Feeling the day is not far distant when no man shall be proscribed, or denied the rights of citizenship, on account of his color, and believing that the people are rapidly awaking to the realization of the fact that a native-born colored man is better entitled to enjoy such rights than a white foreigner, we would earnestly implore every friend of the African race to array himself against the Democratic party at the polls upon Tuesday next." Richard Nixon couldn't have done better. The Democrats swept the 1862 elections in Pennsylvania, but not solely because of this and other dirty tricks. Soldiers, many of whom were Republicans who had been able to vote under Pennsylvania law, were prevented by a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in May of 1862.