[Letter to] My Dear Sir
Contributors: Dole, Ebenezer, 1776-1847, recipient
Series: William Lloyd Garrison Correspondence (1823-1879)
Published: 1834
Place of publication: Boston, [Mass.]
Language: eng
Format: [manuscript]
Subjects: Correspondence; Liberator (Boston, Mass. : 1831); Abolitionists; History; Antislavery movements; Bankruptcy
Notes: Holograph.

Circular letter.

This manuscript consists of a printed circular letter. At the top of page one, there is typed letter by William Lloyd Garrison asking for financial support for the Liberator newspaper. Garrison writes: "If this were strictly in behalf of myself, I should feel extremely mortified, and would not on any account make it; but it does not so much concern me, or my partner, as it does an immense multitude of four hundred thousand persons who are nominally free, and yet deprived of almost every privilege that makes life pleasant and serviceable." On pages one through two, William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp make an appeal for funds so that the newspaper does not die. The financial difficulties of the newspaper are explained: 500 of the paper's 2,000 subscribers have not paid the annual $2 fee, resulting in a deficit of $1,700, $700 of which supports the editor. The proposed solution is that the circulation is extended, subscriptions be paid in advance, and a fund is raised by selling 100 shares at $10 per share. Garrison describes the readership: "It is a remarkable fact, that of the whole number of subscribers to the Liberator, only about one-fourth are white. The paper, then, belongs emphatically to the people of color---it is their organ---and to them its appeals will come with peculiar force."

On the verso, the delivery address is to Ebenezer Dole, Esq., Hallowell, Maine.

Merrill, Walter M. Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, v.1, no.140.