Beschreibung:

(African American - Anti-Slavery) Letters showing the groundbreaking realignment of the American political system around the slavery issue Place Published: New Hampshire and New York Date Published: 1847-1849 Description: Two Autograph Letters Signed: Palmer, Dudley S. Concord, New Hampshire, September 3, 1847. 3 pp. +stampless address leaf. To Charles L. Godfrey, Epping, New Hampshire. Davis, Noah. Albion, New York. October 26, 1849. To his son, Naaman Davis, Stacy Basin, Oneida County, New York. Two letters written before and after the 1848 presidential election, about collaboration of the Whig Party, Free Soil Democrats and the anti-slavery Liberty Party, that presaged groundbreaking realignment of American politics before the Civil War and the pending emergence of the new Republican Party. Palmer a newspaper editor and former New Hampshire state official who had left the Democratic Party to become a dedicated Whig, details for a Liberty Party county chairman - who was also a Whig - how anti-slavery forces of all the parties were collaborating in their conventions, candidate selection and platforms “to make matter works harmoniously,” opposing conservative Democrats, as “violent and unscrupulous a set of politicians as exist in any part of the Union”. Davis, a lawyer and farmer, supported the Free Soilers who had broken with Democratic Party Hunkers on the slavery issue, a split benefitting the Whig nominee Zachary Taylor, himself a slaveholder though wishy-washy on the slavery question. Davis writes his son, “the present prospect now is that we shall beat the Taylorites to death in the state…all must be Democratic true Free Soil principles carried out to the full extent, our meetings have been harmonious, not the least schism… Old Abolitionists…were all satisfied and should support the Ticket….our cause is a just one and under God must prevail…” In the 1848 presidential election, the Whig Taylor won the White House – but only because of the fatal split of the Democrats, with the Free Soil Party winning 10% of the vote nationally - the strongest showing to that time of an anti-slavery third party. Palmer would disappear from the political arena. But Davis would become a founding father of the new Republican Party, elected Judge of the New York Supreme Court, and later to the U.S. Congress. Condition: Very good. Item#: 347066 Headline: Political collaboration of Whigs and Free Soil Democrats