The Slave’s Lamentation. The Hail (Hale) Storm.
No Place (Norwich, VT): No Publisher, 1848. 38x19.5cm: Poetry Broadside. Light handling wear with a few tiny closed tears to edges. Corners gently creased. Scattered foxing, largely confined to margins. Better than Very Good.
A well-preserved abolitionist broadside featuring two poems, each signed in text by F. B. The Slave’s Lamentation serves as an attack on the institution of slavery, describing the grief experienced by enslaved people and questioning the country’s moral direction. The author writes “Poor souls are gone, we know not where - they’re far beyond a mother’s care, / And placed in cruel hands” and completes his poem with “Is this the land of Washington, of Adams, and of Jefferson, / Who laid the corner stone? / Of equal rights, and rightful laws, of freedom and her noble cause, / So dear to every one?” The second poem, The Hail (Hale) Storm, praises Senator John Parker Hale of New Hampshire, an outspoken abolitionist and opponent of the Mexican-American War. The author writes “This mighty hail (Hale) will make some pale, and make them shake and shiver” and “This awful shower now comes with power on those unjust war makers.”
OCLC attributes authorship to Fairbanks Bush, using information derived from Tuttle’s Catalogue 106, October 1940. According to Goddard and Partridge’s A History of Norwich Vermont, “Fairbanks Bush was Norwich’s minstrel poet,” “endowed in some degree with the poetic gift” whose poetry “for the most part took on a lyrical shape.” Fairbanks Bush was also “among the earliest of his townsmen to denounce the crime of slavery.”.
Price: $700.00
Item #10622