4 unused envelopes with illustrations. Including: “The Persuasive Eloquence of the Sunny South” (King & Baird, Philadelphia, ca. 1861); “…Dis chile’s CONTRABAN’” (James Magee, Philadelphia, ca. 1862); “The Result of Secession” (D. Murphy’s Son, New York, ca. 1864); “A King for the South” (D. Murphy’s Son, New York, ca. 1864). 3½x5" each.
Remarkably few of the 3000+ Illustrated Union patriotic envelopes of the Civil War pictured African-Americans. Of the four offered here, only the first, showing a slave being whipped in the “Sunny South” was clearly anti-slavery. The second depicts slaves running away from a slave-owner with a whip, shouting “Come back here, you black rascal” to which the slave, heading for refuge in a Union-held Virginia fort, replies, “Can’t come back nohow, massa; Dis chile’s CONTRABAN’” - a frequent humorous take-off on the Union declaration that escaped Southern slaves could be freed by the Army as “contraband” of war. While this lampooned the Blacks, it was not nearly as overtly racist as the two envelopes printed in New York City, hotbed of anti-draft sentiment: Both use the derogatory “nigger” in the captions, one deriding shoeless drunken slaves who might serve in the Confederate Army, the other showing a well-dressed northern Black pitying a peasant-like southern slave whose “massa” was Confederate.