Wide Awake Pamphlet by Abolitionist Inventor and Father of U.S. Life Insurance

Elizur Wright, An Eye Opener for the Wide Awakes. Printed Pamphlet. Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860. 60 pp., 4 3/4 x 7 1/4 in. In this pamphlet, Elizur Wright offers advice for the Wide Awake younger generation. He explains the moral bankruptcy of the slave power, criticizes the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and explains why he finds the Constitution to be an anti-slavery document. Though he would prefer a bolder opposition to slavery from the Republican Party, he supports the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin in 1860.Publishers Thayer & Eldridge announced the pamphlet's publication on August 28, 1860, in the Boston Evening Transcript. Excerpts"By Elizur Wright. A union-saving, constitutional, conservative, law-and-order, right-side-up-with-care, unblushing, unquivering, unsectional, Zouave-drill, Garibaldian, up-to-the-times Abolitionist." (p1)"Bless your young hearts-you of the fresh, new generation, the blossoming future America,-the America which is to decide whether Liberty of Slavery shall be universal,-you are 'waked up.' Good!" (p3)"A Sample of Principles."If you must hurt, rob or wrong somebody, don't do it to the weak, but pick out a victim at least as big as yourself. Do that for the sweet sake of respecting yourself, if for nothing else." (p5)"Non-intervention is a very good motto for wickedly inclined people, and one cannot but wish they would manacle their own mischievous hands with it at once, but for honest, well-disposed people, it is synonymous with non-sense. Good government is nothing but the intervention of the good against wrong." (p6)"To me the Constitution of the United States is a straight-forward, honest, anti-slavery document, which I cannot swear to support without being such an abolitionist as I am, all of which I hope to show before I get through." (p8)"the only forte of government, the main thing it is good for, is to see that people are let alone; in other words, that every one shall do as he pleases, so long as he pleases not infringe the rights of others." (p9)"Slavery can no more be permanently hedged in, dammed up, or stopped from flowing on to the general result of making all laborers the property of capitalists, by an adjective of color, than Niagara can be impeded by a rainbow." (p13)"Now let us see what is the effect on us, average white people, not negroes at all, of this actual government of the slaveholders. Under those State governments in which the slaveholders are supreme, the great majority of the white population are reduced to comparative poverty by the unjust competition of slave labor, and kept in barbarous ignorance because liberty of the press and free schools are dangerous to negro slavery." (p15-16)"War destroys the results of human labor. Slavery destroys the motives of it." (p18)"If I believed the Constitution did in some subordinate clause forbid it [end slavery], I would in so much abjure the Constitution and do the same, thinking the general welfare and salvation of the country better than a self-contradictory and inadequate piece of parchment. And if I believed, as some people profess to, that the Constitution does consistently and bona fide guarantee slavery, and I had sworn to it, I would abjure. I am not very hard on oaths, sacred or profane-they have their uses and great uses-but I do not think an oath binding people to be unpatriotic and wicked, as well as foolish, in secula seculorum, is worth keeping." (p27)"Now, of all the mysteries in the universe, and I see plenty on every side, the greatest mystery to me is that any northern man or party should have been able to find, or should have had any disposition to find, either a natural or legal reason for any fugitive slave law, whether the equivocally worded one of '93 or the naked unblushing one of '50. I cannot begin to divine how any citizen of a free State could endorse the bare and base insult of the latter for one individual minute, or how any man, with half. (See website for full description).…