Heading: (American Peace Movement, 1849)
Author:
Title: Letter linking anti-slavery cause to prophecy of the United Nations
Place Published:
Publisher:
Date Published: 1849
Description:

Bradford Sumner as Chairman, and Amasa Walker as Corresponding Secretary, American Committee for a Congress of Nations. Boston, June 11, 1849.1 pg. To Rev. E.W.Jackson, Chelsea, Mass, appointing him a delegate to "the Convocation proposed to be held at Paris this Summer."

Amasa Walker was a noted economist political reformer , active in the anti-slavery crusade, being a founder of the Free Soil Party, and, during the Civil War, a US Congressman who supported the "radical" Republican cause of slave emancipation. He had also been a delegate to the first international Peace Congress in London in 1843, which presaged this second conference, chaired by novelist Victor Hugo, where there was much talk of the need for a "Congress of Nations - a dream realized a century later in the UN.

Another American delegate to the 1849 Conference was Henry "Box" Brown, a Virginia slave who had just become a national sensation, escaping to freedom by having himself "mailed" in a wooden crate to Abolitionists in Philadelphia. One month after this letter was written, Boston Abolitionists chose him to join Rev. Jackson as a delegate to the Peace Conference, where he gave a much admired public speech linking the abolition of slavery to the abolition of war.

Very good.