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In honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday and Black History, the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark will display a replica of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation given to the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum in Peterboro by the New York State Library in Albany. The exhibit will be at the Visitor Center at the Gerrit Smith Estate Saturday and Sunday, February 13 and 14 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.One of the nation's greatest documentary treasures, the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln on September 22, 1862, has been part of the New York State Library's collection since 1865. “The unassuming appearance of this four page declaration in Lincoln's hand tends to mask the significance of what one source declared to be the ‘most important and far-reaching document ever issued since the formulation of this government.’ …Though Lincoln had always found slavery morally repugnant, he consistently stated that the Civil War was being fought solely for the purpose of restoring the Union. … Besides, as Lincoln knew, simple justice and moral imperative demanded it.The partial Union victory at the terrible Battle of Antietam in September 1862 provided an opportunity for Lincoln to issue his epoch-making decree. It had taken nearly a century, many years of abolitionist agitation and two years of America's bloodiest war to begin to apply the meaning of the Declaration of Independence to the nation's black population.” (NYS Library)

“Lincoln read this document to his Cabinet on September 22 and told them that he firmly believed in its principles, though he would accept minor changes of wording. Secretary of State William H. Seward, a former Governor of New York and lifelong abolitionist, suggested certain additions which strengthened it and then actually wrote in his revisions. Except for these revisions and the formal beginning and ending written by the Chief Clerk, the document is otherwise entirely in Lincoln's hand. The next day the nation's newspapers gave prominent attention to the Proclamation, beginning a discussion of its importance which culminated three months later.” (NYS Library)

“The proclamation declared that all slaves in states which were still in rebellion on January 1, 1863 ‘shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.’ ” (NYS Library)

In February and March of 1864, the Army Relief Bazaar was held to raise money for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an agency that helped provide medical care for Union soldiers. To assist the Bazaar in its fund drive, Lincoln donated the Preliminary Proclamation, sending it to Emily Weed Barnes through Frederick W. Seward, son of the Secretary of State. On the very last day of the Bazaar, the manuscript was won in a lottery by well-known abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Smith generously gave the proclamation to the U.S. Sanitary Commission to be sold to raise more money. Said Smith, “My purpose when I purchased the tickets…was to let it go to the individual or association, who should pay the largest price for it…As I believe the putting down of this infernal Rebellion to be our highest and holiest work, so I recognize no other claim upon my possessions to be as strong as that of the Soldiers, who are prosecuting this work.” (Letter, Gerrit Smith to William Barnes, March 12, 1864)

Three days after Lincoln's funeral train passed through Albany on April 25, 1865, the New York State Legislature purchased the proclamation for the New York State Library.

The Chicago Historical Society acquired the manuscript copy of the final proclamation. Unfortunately, it was lost when the Society's building was burned during the great Chicago fire of 1871. However, the New York State Library's collection includes 19th century photographs of the final proclamation.

At the Visitor Center on Sunday, February 14 at 2 pm, Norman K. Dann, Ph.D. will present a program on Lincoln as “The Great Emancipator,” the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation’s ties to Peterboro, and describe the Central New York origins of “Lincoln’s party.” Dr. Dann is the author of the 2009 biography of Smith, Practical Dreamer: Gerrit Smith and the Crusade for Social Reform. 

For both days of the exhibit the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum (NAHOF) invites participation in “Linking Lincoln.” A paper chain of 2010 red, white, and blue links with the names of donators of currency with Lincoln’s image will be featured at a ribbon cutting October 24, 2010 to celebrate the Heritage NY Underground Railroad project.

The two day February exhibit is hosted by the Chair of the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark Lodge Squad, Jody Jones, a Morrisville State College Resort and Recreation Management Technology Intern. The program is part of a series of programs provided by the Stewards of the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark through a PACE grant to the Smithfield Community Association from the Central New York Community Foundation. The Estate is on the National Park Service Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, and the Heritage NY Underground Railroad Trail as part of the New York State Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation. The Visitor Center is open during the summer on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 – 5 p.m. and by appointment. Programs and tours are $2 per person, $5 for a season pass, and free to children, stewards, and residents of Smithfield with season passes from The Lodge. For more information mail@sca-peterboro.org or 315-684-3262.

 
 
Fred Morsell, actor and historian who portrays Frederick Douglass, will deliver the keynote address Frederick Douglass on Race: A Soul’s Evolution at the annual dinner of the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum Saturday, 5:30 pm, October 23, 2009, in the Hall of Presidents, James C. Colgate Hall at Colgate University in Hamilton NY. This presentation is compiled from Douglass’ most important speeches and writings on the issue of race. Morsell takes the audience through relevant periods in Douglass’ life and reveals the development of his thought, illustrates the stages of his personal transformation in the understanding of race, and culminates in his illumination about the way to experience our common humanity beyond categories of division.

When the Smithfield Community Association, Peterboro NY, and the Upstate Institute at Colgate University in Hamilton NY launched the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum (NAHOF) in October 2004, a portion of the proposal for the new organization was based upon the words of Douglass: “Liberty came to the freedmen of the United States, not in mercy, but in wrath, not by moral choice, but by military necessity… Nothing was to have been expected other than what has happened.” Black freedom was a legal fact, not a moral fact! The mission of NAHOF is to not only honor abolitionists, but to complete abolition – the moral choice. Morsell was the main speaker at the first induction ceremony hosted by the Upstate Institute at Colgate University in October 2005 and represented Douglass at the great black abolitionist’s induction that same year. Morsell’s first Douglass’ programs in the area were in 2000 when the Madison County Historical Society presented Morsell for the 150th commemoration of the Cazenovia Convention of 1850. Morsell also appeared this year at the Madison County Fair. Acclaimed across the U.S. for his portrayal of Douglass, Morsell’s performances include programs at National Park Service sites, the Smithsonian, the Capitol Rotunda, many Douglass’ centennial events, and this year at the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry.

The annual dinner, catered by the Colgate Inn, Hamilton NY, will conclude with a birthday cake honoring the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln (The Great Emancipator), the 5th anniversary of NAHOF, and the NAHOF partnership with the Upstate Institute at Colgate University.

 
 
The National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum announces plans for the third induction ceremony  for the Hall of Fame. Lewis Tappan and Theodore Dwight Weld will be inducted at 8 p.m. Saturday, October 24, 2009, in Golden Auditorium at Colgate University during a free dramatic evening program created and directed by Hugh C. Humphreys. The Hall of Fame portraits of Tappan and Weld created by artist Joseph Flores, Rochester NY, will also be unveiled. The programs are created for the public to learn of the war against slavery.

At 2:30 p.m. Saturday afternoon during the Abolition Symposia, Fergus M. Bordewich will present Lewis Tappan: Radical and Evangelical – How Religion Inspired the War against Slavery. Bordewich’s presentation will honor New York City businessman Lewis Tappan by highlighting his central role in the development of the abolition movement for the immediate abolition of slavery, and showing more broadly, how Tappan’s fervent evangelical Christianity infused the early antislavery activities. 

Tappan’s role in the 1839 Amistad incident is presented in the Steven Spielberg award winning movie Amistad which will be shown at the Hamilton Theatre, 7 Lebanon Street, Hamilton at 5:00 p.m. Friday, October 23, 2009. A free panel discussion directly across the street at the Colgate Bookstore follows the film. The panel includes Bookstore staff, NAHOF members, and a John Quincy Adams reenactor.

Following the Tappan program, Carol Faulkner, Ph.D., presents Theodore Dwight Weld: Romantic Love and the Anti-Slavery Movement at 3:30. Dr. Faulkner’s presentation will focus on Weld’s career as an abolitionist from his participation in the anti-slavery rebellion at Lyman Beecher’s Lane Seminary to his publication of American Slavery As It Is. For many abolitionists their personal lives were deeply connected to their public commitment to end slavery. Weld was no exception. His courtship with Angelina Grimke involved professions of love as well as debates over anti-slavery principles and practice.

Weld’s principle role in the American Anti-Slavery Society will be included in the first program of the symposia at 1:00 p.m. Owen W. Muelder presents The Establishment of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Its Most Influential Agent, Theodore Weld, and the Significant Impact of his “Seventy.”  Weld recruited agents known as “The Seventy” who traveled and spoke in assigned districts representing the American Anti-Slavery Society.
The afternoon symposia close with a presentation in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday year. Paul Finkelman, Ph.D. presents the legal, political, and military constraints that explain the Emancipation Proclamation and why, in the end, Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. Dr. Finkelman is the William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy and Senior Fellow in the Government Law Center at SUNY Albany.  A specialist in American legal history, race and the law, Paul Finkelman is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and more than twenty books. He is specialist in areas such as the law of slavery, constitutional law, and legal issues surrounding baseball. His work on legal history and constitutional law has been cited by numerous courts and in many appellate briefs. Dr. Finkelman was aFellow in Law and Humanities at Harvard Law School 1982-83. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in 1976, his M.A. from Chicago in 1972 and his B.A. from Syracuse University in 1971.

 

Further tribute to Lincoln includes the exhibition of a replica of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The sixteenth president also appears at the annual dinner and in the evening program thanks to reenactor Jack Baylis.

 

After the symposia Frederick Morsell presents the keynote Frederick Douglass on Race: A Soul’s Evolutionat 5:30 p.m. for the annual dinner in the Hall of Presidents at Colgate. The Hall of Fame event begins Thursday, October 22 at the Colgate campus with the Upstate New York debut of Over the River…Lydia Maria Child, Abolitionist for Freedom, a film about the life, times, and legacy of the famous writer and abolitionist followed by a panel discussion on How Lydia Maria Child is Part of our Work: Our Relationship with Child. The next day on Friday, October 23 at 1:30 p.m. Constance L. Jackson, the writer, director, and producer of the Child film, will conduct a workshop “Becoming Agents of Change: Then and Now.”

 

On Sunday, NAHOF will hold an Open House at its site at the Smithfield Community Center in Peterboro followed by a tour of the Gerrit Smith Estate by Smith biographer Norman K. Dann PH.D.

 

In recognition of the 150th anniversary of John Brown raid’s on Harpers Ferry October 16, 1859, folk artists Greg Artzner and Terry Leonino present Sword of the Spirit, a concert Sunday, October 25 at 1:00 about Brown, his wife Mary, their family, and their abolitionist colleagues at “The Ferry.”

 

The conference closes with the second session of a Public Abolition Lyceum on American Abolition from the Colonial Period to the Civil War. At 3:00 Milton C. Sernett, Ph.D. professor emeritus Syracuse University, presents Freedom Now! Garrisonian Immediatism and Abolition Ends and Means.

 

Details of the public event registration are available at www.abolitionhof    mail@abolitionhof.org, and  315 684-3262.

 
 

The National Abolition Hall of Fame and the village of Peterboro, NY were recently featured by Syracuse.com and the Post Standard.  Check out this very informative piece below.

National Abolition Hall of Fame & Museum, Peterboro, NY
 
 

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,…shall exist within the United States”declared the U.S. Congress on January 31, 1865, as it passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. On January 31, 2009, the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum (NAHOF) announced the induction of two abolitionists who dedicated their lives to the abolition of slavery. The 2009 abolition inductees to the Hall of Fame are Lewis Tappan and Theodore Dwight Weld. The two abolitionists will be inducted at ceremonies October 24, 2009 at Colgate University and commemorated October 23, 2010.NAHOF is searching for relatives and affiliates of both inductees to join the ceremonies.  

Lewis Tappan was born May 23, 1788, in Northampton, Massachusetts. During his lifetime Tappan, a dry goods merchant and silk industrialist, used much of his wealth and energy in the struggle to end slavery. The New York Times described Lewis Tappan as “one of the pioneers in the movement for the abolition of slavery in this country” in his obituary notice published at the time of his death in Brooklyn NY in 1873. Tappan helped to found the American Anti-Slavery Society in December 1833. When the American Anti-Slavery Society split in 1840, Tappan took a leadership role in establishing the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.

 

Tappan gave liberally to the American Anti-Slavery Society and helped to publish The Emancipator. Lewis Tappan and his brother Arthur Tappan provided the financial backing for the establishment of Oberlin College in Ohio, where black and white students were educated together in an abolitionist environment. Tappan worked for the elimination of the “the black pew” in American churches. He aided in the formation of the American Missionary Society in 1846, an organization that did extensive work among the freed people after the Civil War. He supported the Republican Party and the emancipation efforts of Abraham Lincoln.

Perhaps best known for his leadership in the defense of the Africans in the Amistad trials of 1841, Tappan not only helped achieve the release of the Mende people, but also arranged English tutoring and their return to Africa.

Lewis Tappan’s anti-slavery zeal was so well known that it drew him many allies, but also enemies. A pro-slavery mob broke into his dwelling on July 4, 1834, carrying his furniture out to the street and setting fire to it.

Theodore Dwight Weld has many ties to Central New York. Born November 23, 1803, in Hampton Connecticut, Weld moved to Fabius, NY in 1825 with his family. Soon after, Theodore began spending significant time with his mother’s brother Erastus Clark in Utica. Clark, a lawyer, came to Old Fort Schuyler in 1791, commenced a law practice and civic and church involvement, was a founding trustee of Hamilton College, and gave the city the name of “Utica.” Weld met William Kirkland (a tutor at the college his father founded) and roomed at Hamilton College with Kirkland participating on campus in an unofficial status. Weld also became close friends with abolitionist Charles Stuart, a principal at a local academy. Weld’s Pilgrim’s Progress in the Nineteenth Century was first printed in the Utica Christian Repository in 1825. Following a conversion at a Utica revival with Charles Grandison Finney in 1826, Weld enrolled in the Oneida Institute in Whitestown (now Whitesboro, NY).    

Drawn to the reform-oriented western frontier of Ohio, Weld entered Lane Seminary in 1833, and adopted the immediate abolition of slavery as his major reform theme. He led a series of student debates that gained him national recognition as an abolition movement leader. When the faculty and administration of Lane counteracted the abolition position, the “Weldites” left Lane to enter Oberlin College, making it a center of abolition thought.

Weld became a superb orator and organizer for the American Anti-Slavery Society in the mid-1830s. Weld recruited agents known as “The Seventy” who traveled and spoke in assigned districts representing the American Anti-Slavery Society. By late 1836, his vigorous oration had caused the loss of his voice, so he turned to writing as a means of expression. As editor of the Antislavery Almanac, author of American Slavery as It Is, and researcher of arguments to oppose the “gag rule” which forbade the discussion of antislavery petitions received by Congress, Weld was influential in fostering the antislavery movement. Weld, called the “St. John of the Abolitionists” by his daughter Sarah, died in Hyde Park, Mass. February 3, 1895.

The 2005 Abolition Hall of Fame inductees were Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Gerrit Smith, and Harriet Tubman. The 2007 inductees were John Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Wendell Phillips, and Sojourner Truth. These abolitionists were inducted at ceremonies at Colgate University in 2005 and 2007, and commemorated at ceremonies at Morrisville State College in 2006 and 2008.  Self-standing biographical banners for each inductee, sponsored by relatives, affiliates, sponsors, and the New York Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment of the Humanities, are on exhibit at the Hall of Fame. (The exhibit will be at the New Woodstock Free Library for Black History Month 2009.)

The inductees were designated from a listing developed in 2005 from responses of nationally recognized abolition scholars contacted by the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum. Public nomination procedures to the Hall of Fame were announced at the annual October event and are available on the website www.abolitionhof.com  For more information contact mail@abolitionhof.org or 315-684-3262.