Printed report of “The Select Committee to whom were referred certain ‘Resolves’ of the State of Maine ‘relating to Slavery’ have instructed me to report the accompanying Preamble and Resolutions”.

[N.P. Concord: June 1855] octavo, 5, [1], pp., removed from pamphlet volume, slight foxing, separation at upper spine of last leaf, vertical fold, otherwise very good. Like most state legislative documents of the antebellum period, rare as a separate imprint.

1854 Anti-Slavery resolutions by a "violent abolitionist" in the New Hampshire Legislature

Tappan was a prominent New Hampshire lawyer whose first foray into politics saw him elected to the New Hampshire Legislature in 1853 as a "Free Soiler". In 1854, when abolitionists stage a riot at the Boston Court House in an vain attempt to free Black fugitive slave Anthony Burns to prevent his being returned to slavery in Virginia, Tappan was quoted as saying that, if Burns were not released, he hoped the mob would tear down the Court House and shoot every Government officer who interfered with them - and that he was more than willing to join them. One unfriendly newspaper described him as a "violent abolitionist."

The following year, while Tappan was running successfully for the US Congress, he headed the state legislative committee which produced this report, proposing a series of unabashed anti-slavery resolutions demanding that "no more Slave States or Territory shall ever be added to this Union", that slavery should be abolished in the nation's Capital, and that the Fugitive Slave bill should be unconditionally repealed.

Tappan won his congressional race as a Free-Soil candidate and served in the House of Representatives until the start of the Civil War, when he was one of the first to enlist in the Army, briefly becoming Colonel of a New Hampshire regiment.