36. National Anti-Slavery Standard, New York, September 30, 1854 (Vol. 15, no. 19), containing article "Gov. Washburn and the Burns Case."
From Thoreau Family Collection, CFPL Vault Collection.

CYNTHIA THOREAU'S COPY OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-SLAVERY STANDARD FOR SEPTEMBER 30, 1854 

On May 24, 1854, Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave working in Boston, was arrested and jailed.  In consequence, a protest meeting featuring speakers Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker was held at Faneuil Hall.  Thomas Wentworth Higginson led a group of would-be rescuers—including Bronson Alcott—who were prevented by force from accomplishing their mission.  Burns was escorted under armed guard to Long Wharf and returned to Virginia.

The Burns case enraged abolitionists and prompted Henry Thoreau's powerful speech "Slavery in Massachusetts," delivered in Framingham on July 4, 1854.  That it also commanded the attention of Thoreau's mother is suggested by the survival of her personal copy of the National Anti-Slavery Standard for September 30, 1854, which features a front-page article about the role of Governor Washburn in the incident.

37. Star of Emancipation (Boston: For the Fair of the Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society, 1841).
CFPL Vault Collection.

MARIA THOREAU'S COPY OF AN ANTISLAVERY PUBLICATION

The compilers of Star of Emancipation—a production of the Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society—aimed to raise consciousness, and possibly also funds, with this little book.  They wrote in their preface, "If our 'Star' shine from the right point in the moral heavens, and with a certain light, though it be not one of the first magnitude, it serves the end at which we aim,—the deliverance of the bound.  With this single object in view, we commend its pages to the friends of humanity."  This copy is inscribed in pencil on the reverse of the frontispiece, "Maria Thoreau / June 1st 1842."

38. Helen Thoreau.
Antislavery scrapbook, 1837-1843.
CFPL Vault Collection.

HELEN THOREAU'S ANTISLAVERY SCRAPBOOK

From the late 1830s into the early 1840s, Henry David Thoreau's older sister Helen kept a scrapbook of antislavery articles clipped from the Liberator, National Anti-Slavery Standard, Herald of Freedom, Bangor Daily Gazette,and other newspapers.  She mounted these clippings and provided a hand-written index for them in a "recycled" account book for the Charleston, South Carolina firm of Merrick & Course, in which Tilly Merrick—father of Mary Merrick Brooks and, for a time, a plantation owner in South Carolina—had been a partner.  (For preservation purposes, the clippings were dismounted from the scrapbook in the 1970s.)  Helen Thoreau may well have obtained the old volume directly from Mrs. Brooks, who was a friend and neighbor as well as a fellow abolitionist.