Benjamin Lundy letter to Paxton Vickers, May 9, 1839

Letter from Benjamin Lundy to Paxton Vickers, describing land acquisition efforts in Illinois. Lundy, in part, describes his own circuitous journey to obtaining land holdings in Illinois due to an absentee land registrar; he also describes some timber holdings he has come into recently, and asks for Vickers' and his father's help in paying for these titles by offering part of the lands to the family. Like Lundy's other Illinois letters, this correspondence contains illustrative details about the life of land speculators in the Illinois territory early in its history. Lundy's note praises the rivers and landscape of his new landholdings, and also, to a lesser extent, describes the recent flocking of many Pennsylvania Quakers to Illinois in the 1830s. Benjamin Lundy (1789-1839) was a prominent Quaker abolitionist best known for his development of abolitionist periodicals. His Genius of Universal Emancipation was first published in 1821 from his home in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, and enjoyed a wide circulation across the antebellum United States. In the 1820s, the young William Lloyd Garrison came to work for The Genius. Benjamin Lundy traveled widely seeking subscriptions to The Genius, giving talks about the anti-slavery movement, and observing and documenting the conditions of enslaved people across the Americas. He was also involved in the establishment of freed slave colonies in Mexico