A Rare Call for Emancipation Compensated

(EMANCIPATION). (BURRITT, ELIHU). Call for a National Emancipation Convention. [Caption title]. Large 4to broadsheet. [Cleveland?, Ohio?: 1857]. $750.00

A convention call from members of various parties in the North, "that they may co-operate, in a generous and brotherly spirit, with the people of the South, and share with them the expense necessary to the extinction of Slavery..." Signed in print by about 450, from as far west as Iowa, including the ubiquitous Gerrit Smith. Elihu Burritt was Secretary of the group, and the call is for Cleveland, Ohio, August 25-27. The Convention called for the selling of federal lands to fund this project.

The Garrisons, in their biography of their father, citing the Liberator, report: "Amid flagrant civil war, on a rapidly rising marget for slave property, and at a time when steps were being actively taken to reopen the slave trade, Elihu Burritt started a preposterous movement for emancipation at less than half price, from sales of the public lands. According to the rule, that the more impracticable the scheme of abolition, the easier it was to secure the adhesion of the clergy at large, Mr. Burritt succeeded in putting forward the Rev. Eliphalet Nott, the Rev. Mark Hopkins, the Rev. George W. Bethune, the Rev. Leonard Bacon, and other leading divines, together with...Gerrit Smith, to call a convention at Cleveland on Aug. 25." --Garrison, 3, 461.

Garrison, and the more radical abolitionists, planned a convention of disunion for Cleveland or Syracuse in the fall of 1857, and considered Burritt's convention excellent preparation. However, the financial panic of 1857, which began in September with the failure of an Ohio banking institution, made the disunion convention impossible.