Autograph Letter Signed by Bradford Sumner as chairman, and Amasa Walker as corresponding secretary, American Committee for a Congress of Nations, Boston, June 11, 1849, to Rev. E. W. Jackson, Chelsea, Massachusetts

Quarto, one page, formerly folded, (stamp less address leaf missing) otherwise in very good, clean condition.

The letter appoints Jackson as a delegate to the Convention proposed to be held in Paris that summer.

Amasa Walker was a noted economist political reformer, active in the anti-slavery crusade, being a founder of the Free Soil Party, and, during the Civil War, a US Congressman who supported the radical Republican cause of immediate slave emancipation. He had also been a delegate to the first international Peace Congress in London in 1843, which presaged this second conference, chaired by novelist Victor Hugo, where there was much talk of the need for a Congress of Nations a dream realized a century later in the United Nations.

Another American delegate to the 1849 Conference was Henry "Box "Brown, a Virginia slave who had just become a national sensation, escaping to freedom by having himself mailed in a wooden crate to Abolitionists in Philadelphia. One month after this letter was written, Boston Abolitionists chose him to join Rev. Jackson as a delegate to the Peace Conference, where he gave a much-admired public speech linking the abolition of slavery to the abolition of war.