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Correspondence between two of the great American abolitionists, and an excellent look at the inner-workings of the circle of anti-slavery intellectuals active in the mid-19th century.

In November 1850, Parker was helping fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft make their way to safety. The Compromise of 1850 and the new fugitive slave law passed by Congress in 1850 had demoralized Birney, who felt that Northerners needed to be reinvigorated in the anti-slavery cause.

In order to contribute to this process, Birney decided to compose an essay on an 1842 Supreme Court case Prigg vs. Pennsylvania. The court had decided that Congress held jurisdiction over fugitive slaves, but that state magistrates might act against fugitives under the 1793 fugitive slave act unless state law prohibited it. Following this decision, many Northern states passed laws forbidding state officials from pursuing fugitives. The Compromise of 1850 granted circuit courts the power to prosecute runaway slaves.

Birney argued in his essay on the Prigg case that the court had erred in its decision and thereby threatened the liberty of both runaway slaves and of Northern states. Birney constructed an interesting states rights challenge to the Compromise of 1850, using the Supreme Court's error as a basis.

This letter concerns Birney's essay on the Prigg case and his hopes that it will be published. Birney writes that he has sent the manuscript to Parker via Judge Carroll who is travelling from Saginaw by steamboat. If Carroll is unable to contact Parker in Boston, Birney instructed him to leave the letter and manuscript "at the Liberator office." This instruction is interesting inasmuch as William Lloyd Garrison disliked Birney. Birney solicits Parker's opinion on the essay and on an Attorney General's opinion about which they had previously corresponded. Birney complains of his ill health in the letter, and it is known that he wrote with some difficulty in 1850, following several small strokes.

Although Birney believed that his essay on the Prigg case "was one of the best pieces he had ever written...too much time had elapsed since the decision in 1842 to make the article of popular interest, and it was never published." --Fladeland, J.G. Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist (1955), p. 276.