[Rough draft of letter to] Sir [manuscript]

Holograph William Lloyd Garrison wrote this draft of a letter to an unidentified recipient, on behalf of Major Thorndike C. Jameson of the 5th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery. Jameson is about to be tried by court-martial for trying to get colored people to enlist in the 1st North Carolina Heavy Artillery. Garrison warns that officers and men hostile to the colored race may attempt to secure Major Jameson's conviction by means of perjured testimony On the verso, there is an undated, unidentified fragment of a letter. It concerns a protest and a call for a convention of Democrats. The author writes: "We protested against the whole scheme, not as Democrats, or political men and women at all, but simply as Spiritualists who had seen in the history of the past, like spiritual inspiration, lose its power and its purity by an unholy alliance with the temporal power and human schemes, and did not wish to see the experiment repeated."