THE CRIMINAL; THE CRIME; THE PENALTY.
Boston: Walker, Fuller, and Company, 1865. 31, [1 blank] pp. Stitched. Library rubberstamp and gum label in blank portion of title page. Else a clean and Very Good text.
Hepworth became chaplain to the 47th Mass. Regiment in Louisiana in 1862 under Benjamin Butler, and the next year transferred to serve under General Nathaniel Banks. Banks made him a First Lieutenant of the 4th Louisiana Native Guards, a Negro regiment. His pamphlet excoriates the slaveowning "traitors" and "ambitious demagogues" who started the War: They "assumed they were born to be the dominant race. They ruled with a hand of iron... Their real estate stretched from the Atlantic to the Mississippi; and their personal property consisted of four millions of human beings. They allowed no schools to be built; they enacted laws making it a criminal offence to teach a black child the alphabet. Without the sanction of any law, they mobbed any man who dared by word or hint to criticise their institutions."
Denying "partisan fervor" or a "spirit of vengeance," Hepworth calls Jefferson Davis a "criminal," "a wilful subverter of the best ideas of the century, and of the tendency of our institutions." He is "to be tried and condemned, not merely by the military commission convened at Washington, but also by the ideas, the aspirations, the tendencies of the historic hour."
Sabin 31443. Not in LCP, Dumond, Bartlett, Blockson, Work, Nevins. Item #35609
Price: $450.00