Description
Autograph Fair Copy of the third verse of Fling Out The Anti-Slavery Flag, signed ‘Wm. Wells Brown’. 8 lines of verse on 1 page, 9 x 7 inches (folded in half), removed from a Victorian album, in good clean condition. Guernsey, 29 June 1850 William Wells Brown (1814-1884), escaped slave. ‘Fling Out The Anti-Slavery Flag’ was first published in 1848 in a collection of poems edited by Brown entitled ‘The Anti-Slavery Harp; A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings’, one year after Brown published his autobiographical slave narrative. Brown was lecturing in England when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the US; as its provisions increased the risk of capture and re-enslavement, he stayed overseas for several years.
Fling out the anti-slavery flag
And let it not be furl’d,
Till like a planet of the skies,
It sweeps around the world,
And when each poor degraded slave
Is gathered near and far,
O, fix it on the azure arch,
As hope’s eternal star.