TO THE MEN OF RHODE-ISLAND! / Who love HONESTY and TRUTH.
Providence, Rhode Island: N.p., 1847. Broadside measuring 18 x 13 inches, folded with damage to right margin, somewhat stained with a few very small wormholes. Excellent. Item #List3243
TO THE MEN OF RHODE-ISLAND! Who love HONESTY and TRUTH, written in 1847 by John W. Richmond, deals with the repayment of Revolutionary War debt. In 1846, lawyer Wilkins Updike published a book titled History of the Alleged State Debt of Rhode-Island, in which he alleged that prominent men of Rhode Island were making essentially fraudulent claims that Rhode Island still owed them money for Revolutionary War loans. The basis of the dispute, which was widespread in the postwar US, was whether the debts should be repaid in specie or paper money; in 1786, Rhode Island legislators mandated creditors to accept paper money as payment. On Updike’s account, the “dead debt was afterwards resuscitated by political legislation”, prompting those with financial means to purchase the debt “for comparatively nothing, and have and are now endeavouring to defraud the honest yeomanry out of it” by having it repaid in specie.[1] In turn, Richmond’s broadside accuses Wilkins of corrupt behavior for both denigrating the reputation of these purchasers and for neglecting to mention several settlements for payment of interest on these debts by the government of Rhode Island, indicating that the debts were in fact owed and not fraudulent. Richmond, who saw Wilkins as calling for a repudiation of the state’s debt, calls him a “man so far degraded in his moral sensibilities”, “self-disgraced” with his own “evident depravity”, “pitiful”, “miserable”, and “unprincipled”, a man “who knows no true, open, manly and honest course, but vainly hopes by his corrupt acts to ride into political power.”
The severity of this issue for Richmond led him to leave the state in disgust; his headstone, in New London, Connecticut, tells that he was “unwilling that the remains of himself and family should be disgraced by being a part of the common earth of a Repudiating State.” We find eleven copies of TO THE MEN in OCLC.
[1] Wilkins Updike, History of the Alleged State Debt of Rhode-Island (N.p.), 4.
Price: $350.00