Dick Crowninshield, the Assassin, and Zachary Taylor, the Soldier. The Difference Between Them

N.p., n.d. [Hopedale: 1848?]. 16mo (15cm). Sewn self-wrappers; 12pp. A worn copy, stain on first leaf bleeds (with diminishing effect) through entire text; marginal loss to final leaf, not costing text; still, complete and Good. Issued without imprint, but likely printed at Adin Ballou's Hopedale Community, where Wright was a resident (but see note below). Date of composition is given as Jan. 24, 1848 at close of text; this pamphlet was likely printed soon after that date, as Wright's sequel, titled The Employers of Dick Crowninshield, was composed in March of the same year and makes reference to the current work in its foreword.

In typical Wright fashion, a contrarian point of view - here, radical non-resistance - is stretched to its logical limits by unflattering analogy. Wright, the idiosyncratic radical abolitionist, feminist, pacifist, freethinker and proto-anarchist, compares Zachary Taylor's actions at the Battle of Monterey to nothing more than murder for hire, building his analogy around the notorious 1830 murder of a Salem ship's-captain, Joseph White, by a paid assassin (the Dick Crowninshield of the title). After laying out the details of each man's purported deeds (including a quite lurid account of the Battle of Monterey), Wright follows with a long list of "The Differences" between them, concluding in the end that there is no difference in kind: "...The assassin killed a man whom he knew to be innocent; the soldier did the same...The assassin killed the innocent at the instigation of his employers; so did the soldier...The assasin entered into a contract with his employers voluntarily; so did the soldier...", etc. In the end, the only noteworthy difference is that "Zachary's deeds are said by the priests and churches to be God-approved and Christ-like; the assassin's are denounced by them as evil, and only evil..."

At least three separate editions of the pamphlet were issued, with priority likely as follows: (1) a Hopedale imprint, issued with a full title page, dated 1848, in which the title subject's name is misspelled "Crowningshield;" (2) the current edition, undated, issued with drop-title, the subject's name corrected to "Crowninshield"; no imprint, clearly from a different setting of type from the first - but, based on close comparison with digital sources, likely from the same font of type as the first (hence our suggestion of Hopedale as the likely place of printing for this edition); (3) a stated Second Edition, undated, published in Edinburgh, probably the same year. All editions are uncommon; 4 locations noted in OCLC for this edition. No copies traced in commerce.