Birth-day Tribute a machine-readable transcription R. J. Weir Elizabeth Lorang Kristen Treen transcription and encoding Kristen Treen R. J. Weir Elizabeth Lorang aa.18640521.4 cwnewspaperpoetry Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing
http://www.scholarlyediting.org
Association for Documentary Editing University of Nebraska–Lincoln Center for Digital Research in the Humanities
319 Love Library University of Nebraska–Lincoln Lincoln, NE 68588-4100 http://cdrh.unl.edu
2012

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). Derivatives must be credited to R. J. Weir and Elizabeth Lorang, made available non-commercially, and distributed under the same terms.

 Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing editor Amanda Gailey editor Andrew Jewell 34 2167-1257 [Unsigned] Birth-day Tribute The Anglo-African 21 May 1864 [4] The microfilm copy used for transcription was loaned by Northwestern University. <imprint> <date sameAs="#issue_date"/> </imprint> </monogr> </biblStruct> </sourceDesc> </fileDesc> <encodingDesc> <p>This electronic text is a semi-diplomatic transcription of the source text. Hyphenation, punctuation, variant spellings, and errors present in the source text have been retained. The transcription does not attempt to capture all aspects of the original formatting or layout.</p> </encodingDesc> <profileDesc> <creation> <persName xml:id="unk">Unknown</persName> <persName xml:id="rh">Hamilton, Robert</persName> <persName xml:id="th">Hamilton, Thomas</persName> <date when="1864">1864</date> </creation> <langUsage> <language ident="en-US">modern American English</language> </langUsage> <textClass> <classCode scheme="http://authorities.loc.gov"> <term>Abolitionists United States</term> <term>Antislavery movements--United States</term> <term>Antislavery movements--United States--History--19th century</term> <term>Smith, Gerrit, 1797-1874</term> </classCode> </textClass> </profileDesc> <revisionDesc> <change when="2013-03-02" who="#el">made copyediting changes</change> <change when="2013-01" who="#el">revised transcription and encoding to address errors and inconsistencies; updated editorial notes</change> <change when="2012-11" who="#awj">added Scholarly Editing info to TEI header</change> <change when="2012-10-16" who="#el">revised encoding</change> <change when="2012-10-14" who="#el">encoded; added and encoded editorial notes</change> <change when="2012-10-01" who="#kt">variants noted</change> <change when="2012-09-06" who="#el">checked metadata and encoding</change> <change when="2012-09-03" who="#el">created</change> </revisionDesc> </teiHeader> <facsimile corresp="#issue"> <surface xml:id="pp1"> <graphic url="aa.18640521.pp1.jpg"/> </surface> <surface xml:id="pp2"> <graphic url="aa.18640521.pp2.jpg"/> </surface> <surface xml:id="pp3"> <graphic url="aa.18640521.pp3.jpg"/> </surface> <surface xml:id="pp4"> <graphic url="aa.18640521.pp4.jpg"/> <zone xml:id="pp4_cropped" corresp="#poem"> <graphic url="aa.18640521.pp4_cropped.jpg"/> </zone> </surface> </facsimile> <text corresp="#poem #pp4_cropped"> <body> <lg type="poem"> <head type="main" subtype="authorial" rend="center">BIRTH-DAY TRIBUTE.</head> <milestone unit="undeclared" rend="short-bar"/> <head type="sub" subtype="authorial" rend="center">TO GERRIT SMITH.<note type="editorial" resp="#bw #el"><p>On March 6, 1797, Gerrit Smith (d. 1874) was born into an immensely wealthy family. He cultivated a fortune that provided him with the means to support a host of antebellum reform movements, abolition foremost among them. Initially a supporter of colonization schemes, Smith joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and completed his conversion to the principles of immediate abolition in 1837. (John Stauffer, <title level="m">The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002], 98). He became a leading political abolitionist, helping to organize the Liberty party, the National Liberty party, and the Radical Abolitionist party. Political abolitionists nominated him for the U.S. presidency in 1848, 1856, and 1860 (John R. McKivigan, "Smith, Gerrit," American National Biography Online). The same period saw the formation of a remarkable Radical Abolitionist alliance between Smith, Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and John Brown (Stauffer, 15).

Smith won a seat in the Thirty-Third Congress but resigned partway through his term, frustrated by his failure to further his cause. The inefficacy of political abolition prompted him to sponsor militant action; he gave thousands of dollars to the free-soil movement and was one of the "Secret Six" who funded John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (October 16–18, 1859). In the aftermath of the raid, Smith collapsed and spent two months in Utica State Lunatic Asylum. Historian John Stauffer characterizes the early 1860s as a period of "retrogression" for Smith: "stopping the rebellion and preserving the Union now took precedence over ending slavery" (266, 265). Smith's Republican loyalties tempered his abolition fervor, but they did not prevent him from criticizing the party's approach to slavery.

Serus in cælum redeas.From Horace, Odes, 1.2: "do not return too soon to the sky" (trans. David West, Horace Odes I: Carpe Diem [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], l. 45). II. Bend, Winter skies! O! gently bend To arch this day of sacred joy! Blow, Winter wind! O! softly blow, And add thy music's sweet alloy! II. Roll, swinging Earth! O! slowly roll This happy day's recurring round! Shine, torch of Heaven! O! brightly shine, To gild the day from bound to bound! III. Hail, sweetly hail, O gentle wife,Ann Caroll Fitzhugh married Smith in 1822. The chosen day which dawned to be The herald of a noble life, And noblest then, when worthiest thee! IV. Shout, gladly shout! O captive race, And clank to Heaven a myriad hands To greet the day whose radiant face Brings promise unto darkening lands! V. O happy month! the hint of Spring; Of life renewed; of waving fields: Uncounted thanks that thou didst bring That life which richer promise yields! VI. If days by deeds are numbered best, Strong friend of Man! thou'rt full of years. But Heaven, in thee supremely blest, Long spares her son, nor wakes our fears! —Tribune.

"Birth-day Tribute" also appeared in the National Anti-Slavery Standard of May 14, 1864, and the Standard similarly identified the Tribune as the source of the poem. Whether the Anglo-African reprinted it from the Tribune or from the Standard is not clear. The Anglo-African text is identical to the Standard text.

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) established the New York Tribune as a Whig daily in 1841. From its earliest days, the title was animated by a spirit of reform. By the mid-1850s, the various editions of the paper—daily, weekly, and semiweekly—had almost 280,000 subscribers (Adam Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009], 2). Greeley, a force in the fledgling Republican Party, adopted a more radical stance against slavery in the 1850s. During the war, the Tribune "advocated vigorous prosecution of the war and expansion of its meaning: namely, that the war should become an emancipationist crusade, and that the emancipated slaves ought to be armed" (Tuchinsky, 171–72).

Former National Anti-Slavery Standard editor Sydney Howard Gay managed the Tribune from 1862 until 1865. Gay sidelined his own abolitionist convictions and concentrated on satisfying the general hunger for timely war news (Tuchinsky, 217). But Greeley, in his famous editorial address of August 1862, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," urged Lincoln to make war on slavery as a matter of military and moral necessity. Lincoln, then waiting to announce the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, responded by stating that "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery" (Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953], 5:388).

Gerrit Smith was one of Horace Greeley's many reform-minded friends.