Free Democratic Address to the People of the State of New York. In Addressing You at This Time on Behalf of the Democracy of the Empire State... [caption title and first line of text]

New York, 1854. Very good.. Letterpress broadside, 14.5 x 9.25 inches, printed in three columns. Old folds, minor toning along fold lines, small loss just below center horizontal fold costing a few words, expertly repaired on verso, a couple of tiny areas of loss along center horizontal fold just touching a few letters. Overall a nice broadside with important content. A powerful statement against the proliferation of slavery in the United States by the Free Soil Party of New York (here calling itself the "Free Democracy"), and an absolutely full-throated condemnation of both the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the political actors who worked for its passage. The text is signed in type at the end by John P. Hale, Hiram Barney, and John Jay (grandson of the famous first Chief Justice of the United States and second governor of New York), as the "Committee appointed by the State Convention of the Free Democracy." The text of the address is consumed with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which had passed the Congress in May of this same year. The authors of the present broadside refer to the act variously as "the Kanza-Nebraska bill," "the Kansas-Nebraska bill," "the Nebraska bill," and on three separate occasions, "the Nebraska perfidy."

The authors rail against the "political antagonists" who perpetrated the Kansas-Nebraska Act, most notably Stephen Douglas, whom they call "an accomplice and tool of the slaveholders." They also pejoratively refer to those responsible for the bill's passage as "the Nebraska conspirators," "the slavery extensionists," "mere hucksters," "traitors," and other unsavory names, arguing in charged language that the bill itself is a violation of the public trust, "a falsehood," and "a crime...saturated with fraud." They point out that the current elections are proving that "despite the struggling resistance of a desperate administration, the Nebraska perfidy is repudiated by an indignant people." In addition to these and other phrases and contexts throughout the text, the authors excoriate the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a "violation of the Missouri Compromise...which for thirty years had been regarded as a firm, inviolable, irrepealable compact, consecrating forever and without recall the territory north of 36 degrees 30 minutes to perpetual, universal freedom."

The broadside was produced in the Fall of the midterm election year of 1854. Its authors rail against both of the major political parties and encourage New York voters to "declare your sovereign will upon the present state of things...Slavery is the one element that disturbs our peace and threatens our stability. Originally sectional and local, it openly aims to become national and universal.... The power of deciding it is in your hands. Act, as the South declare you will, as 'hucksters in politics' - 'knock under,' as they predict and hope, to the sectional coalition, which having betrayed and defrauded you, now sneers at your want of spirit, and all is lost, and most of all your honor...But act in the spirit of your fathers, drive back to its southern bounds the mean tyranny that, overstepping our ancient landmark, seeks to lord it over the free citizens of free states; that is corrupting and degrading our politics and extinguishing all that is noble and manly in our land, and then freedom, honor, faith, will become, as of old, the moving principles of our republic."

The authors then conclude: "Let each citizen, who has felt the insult and wrong of the Nebraska perfidy, remember his personal responsibility, and swell by his vote that record of condemnation which, gathering from state to state, is about to fill Congress with honest representatives, who will convince the slave power that 'there is a North.'"

Rare, with only three copies in OCLC, at AAS, Yale, and Syracuse. A stark example of the regional strife between North and South, free state and slave state, abolitionist and slaveholder that would lead, in just a handful of years, to the Civil War.