A striking example of abolitionist ephemera from the mid-nineteenth century. James Valentine’s finely engraved envelope incorporates a host of images associated with the abolition of the slave trade.
Valentine (1815-1879) was born in Dundee and educated in Edinburgh. Having returned to Dundee in 1832, he established a business and gained fame as an engraver and, later, a photographer. “About 1849 he met the colourful American social campaigner Elihu Burritt; he was involved in publicity for Burritt’s visit to Dundee, producing engraved illustrated envelopes supporting his varied causes, which included universal brotherhood, arbitration for war, freedom of commerce, and (more mundanely) penny postage overseas.” Burritt also campaigned against slavery and this envelope by Valentine is very much in line with the rest of his productions. More importantly, Harriet Beecher Stowe toured the United Kingdom in 1853 and may have met Valentine. In 1854, he designed an enveloped engraved with scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Here he has produced something every bit as dramatic.
On the left, it shows Britannia supported by a lion as the protector of an enslaved man in a pose reminiscent of Josiah Wedgwood’s famous “Am I not a man and a brother?” Above them, a banner reads “God Hath Made of One Blood All Nations of Man.” The two of them look at the scene on the right of the envelope connected by the ocean. Here a slave trader flogs an enslaved man lashed to a pole, another lies supine as a woman and child look on. Nearby, a third trader holds a cord around the neck of a kneeling man, and in the background a fourth has bound four enslaved men to a log with neck chains. In the distance, a group of men wait to be loaded on a slave ship.
This example is of additional interest for being addressed from Austinburg, Ohio to Meadville, Pennsylvania. Austinburg was an important stop on the Underground Railroad, and the home of the abolitionist Betsy Mix Cowles. The recipient, Edward D. Sweeney, was a freshman at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Meadville is situated in Crawford County, which is also the home of John Brown’s tannery.
Bodily, Richard, et al, British Pictorial Envelopes of the 19th Century, Chicago, 1984, pp240-1.
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