Orations and Speeches [1845-1850] (2 volume set)

Charles Sumner

Boston,: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850

2 volume set. 410 pp. + vii, 482 pp. 19 cm.  Clipped autograph signature of Charles Sumner (USS) mounted opposite title page. Bound in publisher's blind stamped brown cloth. Gold lettering. Hardcovers. Some wear to cover, spine head/tail frayed. Chip missing from top corner of Vol. I spine. Clean, unmarked pages. Charles Sumner was the noted Massachusetts abolitionist Senator. This work collects Sumner's most important speeches against slavery, the Mexican-American War, and for "free soil" made before joining the US Senate.   In a horrific episode in 1856, while giving a speech denouncing slavery in Kansas, Sumner was savagely beaten by Sen. Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Sabin 93668.  A short quote from this work: "Slavery is wrong... As it is our perpetual duty to oppose wrong, so must we oppose Slavery; nor can we ever relax in this opposition so long as the giant evil continues any where." Vol. 2, p. 410. Interesting provenance: Early signature of Albert G. Browne, 1850 (Massachusetts). (Also owned by his son Albert G. Browne Jr.)  Albert Gallatin Browne served the US treasury during the Civil War in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.  Browne was tasked with seizing Confederate arms and supplies and then subsequently overseeing trade and commerce for occupied Southern territories. His son, Albert G. Browne, Jr. subsequently owned this book.  Browne Jr. served as a war correspondent for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune (Mormon - Utah War / Civil War).  Both Brownes were noted abolitionists and admirers of Sumner.  (Browne Jr. was forced to flee Boston in 1854 after freeing an escaped black slave,  Anthony Burns.) For more information on Browne, please see Harvard Magazine's article, William MacKinnon, "Albert Gallatin Browne Jr. Brief life of an early war correspondent: 1832-1891."  November-December 2008. Later, lovely Maine,  Kin O'Ktaadn bookplate of Walter Francis Kimball.  This work includes related genealogical ephemera about the Brownes.  (Browne's papers are at Harvard.)