On Pioneering Black Engraver Patrick Henry Reason's Iconic Letterhead

New York: Anti-Slavery Office, July 19, 1836. Three-page autograph letter on bifolium, signed by abolitionist, social reformer, and journalist Henry B. Stanton, to fellow abolitionist and reformer Rev. Samuel J. May, discussing the Anti-Slavery Society's desperate need for financial support, and pleading with May for aid. In part, "Mr. Lewis Tappan, Treasurer pro tem. says unless measures are immediately taken to raise funds, he shall move that our agents be re called & our publications cut down to the subscription demand. This would be disastrous--dreadfully so. It must not be. What! When we have gained so much, now to yield,--& that for lack of a little cash? Will our friends who have the means, suffer it to be? ...Our friends have the means, in their hands, to meet the demand:--and they ought to respond to the call...With these facts before them, the Committee have directed me to visit the Abolition centres, & call for pecuniary aid...Can I get any cash if I come to Brooklyn? How much? Will it be worth my while to come? Cannot you raise us some there?" First page with engraving at top by Patrick Henry Reason, after Josiah Wedgwood, "A Colored Young Man of the City of New York 1835". Addressed on verso of integral leaf, remnant of wax seal on same with open tear from when opened. Docketing on verso; creasing from old folds.

Henry Brewster Stanton (1805–87), abolitionist, social reformer, attorney, and husband of women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, writes to abolitionist, Rev. Samuel J. May, in his capacity as secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Stanton informs May, who served on the Society's Executive Committee, of the organization's dire financial straits and urgently appeals to him for assistance.

Written on a rare AASS letterhead featuring the iconic engraving by early Black engraver Patrick Henry Reason (1816-92). Born to free Black parents who emigrated from the West Indies, Reason was educated at the New York African Free School. In 1833 he was apprenticed in New York as an engraver, and enjoyed abolitionist patronage throughout his early career. His first published work was the frontispiece for Charles C. Andrews's History of the New York African Free Schools (1830), which Reason executed at the age of 13. The above engraving, a variation of the seal designed by Josiah Wedgwood in 1787 for the English Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was commissioned by AASS founder Lewis Tappan, and was first used in the 1836 publication The Fountain. From there it was widely used by abolitionists and the AASS on letterheads as seen above, as well as on tokens, sometimes with the caption "Am I Not a Woman & a Sister".

Formed in Philadelphia in 1833 by 60 prominent abolitionists, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) was a nationwide organization committed to the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people. The group employed a wide range of tactics, including the publication of pamphlets, broadsides, and circulars, the sponsoring of lectures, the encouragement of acts of civil disobedience, and the boycotting of goods produced by enslaved labor, to compel a national moral reckoning with slavery. Among the society's founding figures was the Rev. Samuel J. May (1797–1871). Though initially drawn to colonization as a young man, May underwent a shift in conviction around 1830 when William Lloyd Garrison persuaded him to embrace immediate abolitionism. From that point forward, May dedicated himself to the cause, even in the face of mob violence. Together with Garrison, he helped establish both the New-England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) and the AASS itself, where he sat on the executive committee alongside Lewis Tappan and worked as a paid agent.

May's activism extended beyond the organization's leadership. He publicly supported Prudence Crandall's efforts to operate a school for Black girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, and he published The Unionist, an abolitionist newspaper, beginning in 1833. He also lent his assistance to the formation of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1834. Deeply committed to racial equality, May consistently advocated for racial and gender integrated meetings at a time when many reformers favored segregation by race or sex. He actively aided people escaping from bondage and was an acquaintance with Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass. He served as president of the Syracuse Fugitive Aid Society, and on behalf of the AASS, he traveled to Canada to visit communities of formerly enslaved people who had settled there. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he founded one of the earliest Freedmen's Relief Associations, in 1862. During the postwar period he became a vocal proponent of Radical Reconstruction, and championed voting rights, education, and land redistribution for the newly freed population.