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  • The Paris Review

    For Our Cause Is Just

    by Lydia Moland Jul 07, 2017 5 minutes

    The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child feared the effects of electing “a blot upon humanity.”

    An engraving from Lydia Maria Child’s The Oasis, 1834.

    “I am not yet prepared to believe that the people of this republic are corrupt enough to choose by fair and honest votes, such a blot upon humanity as Andrew Jackson,” Lydia Maria Child wrote to her new mother-in-law in the early months after Jackson’s election in 1828. When I stumbled upon this letter among Child’s papers at Harvard, I felt a pang of sympathy. The sorrow and despair behind Child’s reluctance to accept her fellow citizens’ choice were all too familiar. She did not contest the election: the votes had been “fair and honest.” Why, then, did she call her fellow citizens “corrupt”?

    Child was only twenty-six when Jackson was elected, but she was already an established author, well on her had propelled her to literary fame with its sympathetic account of the plight of native Americans. Her 1833 treatise was so progressive in the cause of abolition and so scathing against northern racism that she was temporarily ostracized from Boston society. Undaunted, she followed the with and the , as well as newspaper columns, children’s stories, and novels all with abolitionist themes

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