?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
FREDERICK DOUGLASS; editor. Early issue of the North Star, Volume I, no. 36. 4 pages, 25 x 18 1/4 inches, on one folding sheet, unbound; moderate dampstaining and a bit of water damage along the lower inner margin. Rochester, NY, 1 September 1848
The masthead of this scarce and important abolitionist newspaper reads "Right is of no sex--Truth is of no color--God is the father of us all, and all we are brethren." With the 1848 presidential election two months away, politics were a central concern. Abolitionists were disappointed with Whig nominee General Zachary Taylor and were gravitating toward the fringe Free Soil and Liberty parties. Half of the front page is devoted to an "Address to the Four Thousand Colored Voters of the State of New York" by Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817-1866), like Douglass a refugee from slavery on Maryland's eastern shore. Another famed slave narrative author, Henry Bibb, contributes a call for the upcoming National Convention of Colored Freemen on page 3; a short defense of Bibb's character is on page 2. An account of a speech by yet another, William Wells Brown, appears on page 3. An advertisement for Macon Bolling Allen of Boston, the nation's first Black lawyer, appears on page 4.
