Description:

Slavery
Georgia Gov. Troup, the "Hercules of states' rights", Rejects 1824 Ohio Emancipation Resolution, Rare Broadsheet Circular!


3pp partly handwritten and partly printed DS with integral address leaf signed by 32nd Governor of Georgia George McIntosh Troup as "G.M. Troup" near top of third page. Two grammatical errors in the printed text have been hand-corrected in black ink. Docket inscription found on second page. Leaf bearing both handwritten and stamped philatelic markings. In very good to near fine condition, with expected folds. Isolated minor repairs throughout, mostly to creases. The gutter of the bifold paper has also been reinforced. Each page measures 8" x 9.75".

 


From Milledgeville, Georgia on December 22, 1824, Governor G.M. Troup and colleagues reported to "His Excellency The Governor of Pennsylvania" that Georgia had rejected the January 17, 1824 Ohio Resolution. This controversial resolution, introduced at the Ohio General Assembly almost a year earlier, had proposed the gradual emancipation of slaves contingent on their removal to West Africa.  All "people of color, held in servitude in the United States" born after passage of the law would be manumitted at age 21 and transported to colonies overseas. Ohioans believed that this resolution would neither "violat[te] the national compact" nor "infring[e upon] the rights of individuals". Furthermore, the resolution was "predicated upon the principle that the evil of slavery is a national one, and that the people and the states of this union ought mutually to participate in the duties and burthens of removing it."

 


The response of Northern, Mid-Atlantic, Southern, and Western states to the January 17, 1824 Ohio Resolution  further entrenched regional divisions and loyalties. Delaware accepted it, as did Vermont, whose Secretary of State editorialized that "slavery is an evil to be deprecated by a free and enlightened people". Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and other Cotton Belt states promptly rejected it.

 


The response from Georgia Governor G.M. Troup recapitulated most of the pro-slavery rhetoric that Southern states would espouse -- and Northern states condemn -- during the next thirty years leading up to the Civil War.

 


Georgia cited property laws and the long-standing tradition of slave owning in the South as two of many reasons why slavery should continue. "Such states owe it to themselves to preserve unimpaired those rights, since the causes which extracted the constitutional concession on this subject continue to exist in all their force." The government of Georgia concluded that the Ohio Resolution would "infringe [on the] rights of the State of Georgia".

 


Georgia's slaves were better treated than manumitted blacks kept in poverty or in prison in the North, the document continued, adding, "If, in the South, they [the slaves] do not revel in liberty, they are at least supplied with the necessary wants of life." The Ohio Resolution was "indelicate" and "calcula[ting]", and did nothing except inflame slaves with misled hope, Troup reasoned.

 


The document continued that only slaveholding states could determine if and when slaves would be emancipated. "Georgia claims the right with Southern Sisters, whose situation in this regard is similar, of moving this question when an enlarged system of benevolent and philanthropic exertions, in consistency with her rights and interest, shall render it practicable." Characterized in this way, the South claimed that it would entertain the possibility of ending slavery only when it could responsibly do so, thereby wresting back some of the abolitionists' moral high ground.

 


George McIntosh Troup (1780-1856) was a graduate of modern day Princeton University. He managed his family's multiple plantations, passed the Georgia bar, and entered into state politics. He served as Governor of Georgia between 1823-1827 advocating for the forced removal of the Creeks, among other policies.


 

An exceptional document examining the antebellum slavery debate!


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