Remember Your Weekly Pledge To the Mass. A. S. Society . [paper and board weekly contribution box issued by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society]. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Remember Your Weekly Pledge To the Mass. A. S. Society . [paper and board weekly contribution box issued by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society]

Yellow paper covered boards, illustrated with an image of a kneeling slave on the front below the above title, each side with text within decorative borders. 2-1/4x1-3/8x3 inches. An extraordinary survival: a late 1830s coin box, produced by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to raise money for the cause, decorated with abolitionist imagery, verse and prose. Teresa Goddu's masterful description of this weekly pledge box, in her Selling Antislavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), bears lengthy quotation: "Created to accompany the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's [MASS] Weekly Contribution Plan, which raised money for the cause by collecting small donations at regular weekly intervals, the coin box exemplifies many aspects of abolitionist media culture. It functioned as a treasury, an illustrated tract, and a domestic material object. As a depository, it fulfilled an important institutional role, providing funds for the MASS when the economic depression of the late 1830s forced large contributors to withhold their donations. Paying, according to their ability, one, two, or six cents a week, the movement's grassroots members raised substantial amounts without undue labor or sacrifice. By distributing across all abolitionists the responsibility of keeping the state society's treasury 'constantly supplied' with funds to support lecturers and produce printed material, the plan's penny capitalism weathered market fluctuations and increased its members' personal investment in the cause. A miniature of the treasury to which it is dedicated . the box served as a sign of the society's organizational strength and transformed its contributors into stakeholders every time they deposited a coin into its slot. The box compounded its cents, producing money for the cause as well as interest in it. ". [T]he box solidified support for the society's aims by stimulating sympathy for enslaved people and converting that feeling into economic capital. Issued as an 'edition' for six and a quarter cents or seventy-five cents for a dozen, the box was, according to The Liberator, 'as useful as a tract, as it is convenient as a treasury.' 'Appropriate devices and inscriptions' cover every side as well as the top. The front features an image of a kneeling slave framed by rays of light, which melt the chains on the Corinthian columns in the foreground, promising her release. Emanating from an arc with the words 'Remember Your Weekly Pledge,' the light derives its power from contributors' stedfast donations. Contributors answer the kneeling woman's prayer when they drop a coin into the top of the box, directly above her imploring eyes. Located in the heavens and sanctified by the biblical injunctions that frame the deposit slot and speak of transforming faith into good works, the donations assume God's moral authority and power to lift the oppressed. Maria Weston Chapman's poem, 'A Sabbath Morning Hymn,' printed on one side of the box, further consecrates each contribution as a gift to freedom; the biblical injunctions on the other side remind readers of their duty to deliver the slave and show her mercy and compassion. The back, which lays out the objectives of the Weekly Contribution Plan along with step-by-step directions for conducting it, ties this sympathy for the slave to antislavery organization. "Like many antislavery artifacts, the coin box speaks in several registers: sentimental and religious, organizational and instructional. The front image generates sympathy for the oppressed; the poetic hymn and quotations from scripture increase that sympathy and tie it explicitly to religious duty; and the back explains how good works for the slave are best performed through systematic donations to the antislavery cause. The box's coordinated message teaches contributors to turn their sympathy into cents. By gathering coins, abstract feeling is turned into concrete action and sympathy is made to speak" (Goddu, pp. 1-3). We note examples of.…