Letter from Henry Clarke Wright, Boston, [Massachusetts], to William Lloyd Garrison, [18]61 March 18

Henry Clarke Wright writes to William Lloyd Garrison, quoting a passage about the abandonment of Fort Sumter from the latest issue of the New York Tribune, saying "it will cheer the heart of every friend of freedom & of humanity." Wright celebrates the article discussing the Cabinet's belief in the splitting of the Union as proof that the American people understand "that Liberty & Slavery cannot coexist & enjoy equal rights & immunities under the same government." Wright then quotes from the "Traveller of Saturday the 16th", an article posing the choice between a reconstruction of the Union "on the basis of an unconditional surrender to the slavocracy" or "a peacefable, formal dissolution of the Union" through a National Convention. Wright then hopes the "Republican party & Administration [will] inauguate & actualize a peaceable & bloodless Dissolution of the kidnapping, slave-hunting & slave-trading Union."
Courtesy of Boston Public Library