Might and Right
Providence: A. H. Stillwell, 1844. First Edition. 12mo (19.5cm). Brown cloth, titled in gilt on spine; plain endpapers; [i]-xii [13]-324pp; steel-engraved frontispiece with tissue guard. A straight, bright copy, cloth just lightly worn; two small damp-stains to front endpapers and mild foxing to the frontispiece portrait of Dorr; Very Good. The work has been attributed to both Frances Harriet Greene and to Catherine R. Williams.
A quite radical contemporary account of the mid-nineteenth-century Rhode Island universal suffrage movement and the 1841-1842 Dorr Rebellion, when Thomas Dorr led disenfranchised Rhode Islanders in an attempt to demand changed electoral rules and broader democracy. The author explicitly allies the Dorrites to fellow worker's rebellions in America and Europe, characterizing these movements as a class war whose time has come: "...The spirit of the age will not long permit some men to live sumptuously, and fatten on the labor of others while the poor laborer, himself, is starving...The days of their wrong are numbered. They must be weighed in the balance, and found wanting; and their kingdom shall be divided. The repealers of Ireland, the Chartists of England, the Free Suffrage men of Rhode Island, are awake, and acting..." A second edition, containing a new Appendix, was issued in the same year. SABIN 48898. AMERICAN IMPRINTS 44-3929.
Price: $250.00