134. [Slavery]. Broadside, “Reply to Bobalition of Slavery”, Boston, ca. 1820, 1 page (10.25 x 17.25 in.; 260 x 438 mm.) Moderate scattered foxing and soiling; folds; two minor losses affect words of text; some marginal wear.
 
A rare broadside “Reply to Bobalition of Slavery” lampooning the annual Boston celebration commemorating the end of the American slave trade.

This broadside was among several issued in Boston between 1816 and 1828, of which few remain extant. They poked fun at the annual celebrations held by the black residents of Boston on 14 July to celebrate the anniversary of closing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. Two hundred persons marched in the first annual procession, held the following year, which concluded at the African Meeting House with a sermon delivered by the Reverend Jedediah Morse (
Columbian Centinel, Boston, 16 July 1808, p. 2). By the end of the next decade, the annual procession had grown in size enough to include a “corps of Lancers” and a band (New York Daily Advertiser, 19 July 1819, p. 2).
 
Like other examples sourced, these satirical broadsides read like military orders, reflecting the martial aspects of the procession. The present example, billed as a “
Reply”, reads in very small part: “Boston, Uly 14, 18020.” to “MY MOSE VERY DEAR FREN,” replied “Sambo Stapum” and writes, in part: “I hab de supreme deflicity to lette you know dat I receive your lass letter by mail which de market man say you gib him. It be some two tree, seven or eight mont sense I hear from you lass summer, and next winter afterwards fore dat time too. So I hope you discuse me, cause I no write sooner or fusser fore now.”
 
First appearing in Boston, these broadsides developed into a genre imitated first in Philadelphia in the early 1830s and then soon thereafter in New York (Joanne Pope Melish, 
Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860, 1998, p. 172-173). The language, which poked fun at African-American speech, gave rise to an entire genre of entertainment that anticipated the rise of minstrelsy beginning in the 1830s. One historian noted the language, or better stated, “compound ventriloquism,” as whites were impersonating blacks imitating whites, cast African-Americans as interlopers in a dominant white culture, demeaning them with condescension and ridicule. “It is though whites employed the broadsides to sharpen the image of free people of color, still blurred by gradual emancipation: to distinguish them clearly from whites, to define those distinguish characteristics as innate, and to fix the location of that innate difference back to the black body (and mind) in estranging language manufactured for the purpose. Once constituted by whites in this way, the conception ‘free negro’ was available for endless reference and replication in cartoons and later, in minstrelsy: ritualized performances that extended the broadsides' ridicule of 'defective' citizenship and their mockery of both the successes and the failures of free people of color in industrialized America into the domain of theater and the purview of the working class.” (Ibid. p. 183). $4,000 - $6,000

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