The Atlanta Republican --- Extra....Saturday, December 18, 1880 [caption title]

Atlanta: December 18, 1880. About very good.. Broadside newspaper extra, 19 x 11.25 inches. Old folds and creases, a bit wrinkled, minor soiling, minor fraying and light staining to top edge, tiny hole at center crossfold. An extraordinarily rare broadside newspaper extra from the only Republican paper in the state of Georgia to survive the end of Reconstruction. The Atlanta Republican was issued weekly between 1874 and 1886, and was devoted to Republican Party causes during Reconstruction. The present extra issue is a ringing endorsement of Hon. Amos T. Akerman (1821-1880), the Republican nominee to a recent open circuit judgeship in the state. Akerman was a Dartmouth-educated jurist who moved south to practice law. He settled in Georgia in 1850, and true to his surroundings, owned several slaves and served as a colonel in the Confederate Army. Following the war, Akerman became an advocate for Reconstruction and freedmen's rights, served as U.S. Attorney for Georgia, and eventually worked as President Grant's attorney general, crusading against the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan during the early 1870s. Though a Republican in Reconstruction Georgia, Akerman remained a largely popular figure in the state.

The present broadside documents a meeting by the Atlanta Bar in which they speak glowingly about the "ability, learning, and integrity" of Akerman, praise his "unswerving fidelity to the Republican Party at the most stormy and trying periods of the struggles [of the] South," and note both his "manly services in the cause of the true national and human and sentiments and principles in the trying days of reconstruction," and "valuable services to the cause of Republicanism during the last fifteen years." The work also mentions Akerman's volunteer services during a supposed "negro insurrection" in Georgia in the mid-1870s, in which Akerman's work "resulted in restoring peace and satisfying the impassioned and infuriated whites that there was no insurrection attempted or contemplated." The Bar calls for united support for Akerman, and the broadside concludes with an article about a "Committee of Lawyers appointed to press the claims of Mr. Akerman for the Circuit Judgeship." Despite the strong support statewide, Akerman was never able to accept the judgeship had it been offered to him; unfortunately, he died three days after the issuance of the present newspaper extra. Still, the broadside remains an interesting example of the waning though remaining Republican influence in very late-to-post-Reconstruction Georgia.

The present newspaper extra is not in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society nor in OCLC, but one is apparently located at the University of Georgia's broadside collection.