[Missouri Compromise]: Miner, Charles:

From the Record of the Times. Third Letter by Charles Miner. On the Repeal of The Missouri Compromise. Respectfully Addressed to the People of Luzerne [caption title].

[Luzerne County, Pa. April, 1854]. Broadside, printed in six columns, approximately 24 x 18 inches. Old folds, minor wear and foxing, some creasing, minor printer's error near the top of the last four columns (paper was creased on the press) resulting in minor loss of text on two lines of each column. Closed tear at one fold. Contemporary docketing in ink on verso, reading, "Missouri Compromise." Untrimmed. About very good. Item #5059

An unrecorded broadside printing of a long treatise warning of the dangers of repealing the Missouri Compromise and opening the territories of the American West to slavery. The text seems to have appeared first in a newspaper in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania called The Record of the Times, and Wilkes-Barre Advocate, which ran from 1853 to 1865. The author of the present treatise, Charles Miner, appears to have owned and operated the paper along with his brothers William P. and Joseph W. Miner.

Miner's text calls immediate attention to the "proposition before Congress to admit Slavery throughout all our vast western territory" because, as he also notes, "within the last fifty years many thousand inhabitants of Luzerne have emigrated to the West and have greatly bettered their condition." As such, it is the best interests of any more western emigrants that slavery not be allowed in the west because "Experience has shown that the existence of Slavery is to degrade the white labourer, repress enterprise, and produce a cheerless and deadening influence all over the country where it prevails." Miner goes on to discuss the "first principles" of the constitutional aspects of slavery, the economic history behind slavery's institutionalization in the new United States, the legislative history of slavery, and more, all in an effort to support his central proposition, "That the Statesman who framed, and the people who ratified the Constitution, regarded Slavery as an evil -- to be dealt with prudently to be sure, but to be circumscribed within the narrowest possible limits, its growth to be arrested, and finally to be extirpated from the land." To further support his argument, Miner quotes liberally from the writings of the Founding Fathers and some founding documents, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, the Northwest Ordinance, the Constitution itself, and others.

Sadly, though Miner authored this impassioned plea against the further spread of the peculiar institution, the Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854, the month after this broadside was printed; the Civil War began just seven years later. Charles Miner also authored a second, similar and related, broadside entitled, Letter on the Nebraska Question, (Respectfully Addressed to the Delegation in Congress, from Pennsylvania), for which OCLC locates a single example, at the Library of Congress. Presumably Miner authored a first letter, as well, though it seems to be thus far lost to history. The present broadside printing of Miner's third letter appears unrecorded, too, with no copies in OCLC, at AAS, nor in the Library Company's Afro-Americana Collection, Work, Blockson, or any other sources we consulted.

Price: $1,500