Lydia Maria Child

An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans. (1833) Lydia Maria Child

An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans by Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) provoked a storm of controversy when published in 1833. A prominent Massachusetts politician hurled the book out of the window with a pair of fire tongs. The Boston Athenaeum rescinded the free library privileges the trustees had conferred on Child. Former patrons among the Boston elite slammed their doors in Child's face and cut her dead in the streets. Most disastrous for a woman who supported herself and her husband with her pen, the sales of her books plummeted. The outrage Child's Appeal aroused indicates how deeply entrenched the slave system and the racist ideology upholding it were in the nation's political, economic, and social life-and how much courage the book's thirty-one-year-old author displayed by challenging the "peculiar institution" at the risk of forfeiting her literary popularity and her livelihood.