PBA Galleries

Includes:

• Proceedings of the New Hampshire Baptist State Convention. Together with…the Baptist Anti-Slavery Society…At their Annual Meetings. Held at Hillsborough. June 27, 28 & 29 – 1843. 32 pp. (8vo) original wrappers. Concord: Baptist Register Office, 1843. Three pages are devoted to the cause of the Anti-Slavery Society, which “goes gloriously on.” Earlier in the 19th century, white Baptists of both North and South were opposed to slavery, but in the 1840s, while the northerners remained fervent abolitionists, a Southern Baptist Convention was formed to defend the institution of Black slavery as ordained by God.
• Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Vermont Colonization Society; presented at the Annual Meeting in Montpelier, October 18th, 1856. 20 pp. (8vo) original wrappers. Burlington: C. Goodrich & Co., 1856.
• American Colonization Society. The African Repository. Vol. XXXVII, No. XII, December 1862. 35 pp. (8vo) original blue wrappers (detached). Washington: William H. Moore, 1862.

Three pages [of the first publication] are devoted to the cause of the Anti-Slavery Society, which “goes gloriously on.” Earlier in the 19th century, white Baptists of both North and South were opposed to slavery, but in the 1840s, while the northerners remained fervent abolitionists, a Southern Baptist Convention was formed to defend the institution of Black slavery as ordained by God.

The third publication is signed on front wrapper by G.W. Keely, Professor of Mathematics at Waterville College [Colby University].  After four decades, the scheme to send freed American Blacks to “colonize” the new country of Liberia on the northwestern coast of Africa, was widely dismissed by fervent anti-slavery crusaders as a slaveholders’ diversion. Ever hopeful, in 1856, the Vermont Society detected “an evident change in public sentiment in respect to the righteousness and final success of our cause” among moderates who opposed radical abolitionism. But while such Colonization groups would survive for decades to come, the onset of Civil War was to permanently doom their “cause”. Ironically, while the final Colonization periodical of 1862 stressed sympathy for the minority of Blacks who were “free people of color”,  in a matter of days, President Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation that would make all African-Americans free.