A Letter to the Hon. Samuel a. Eliot, Representative in Congress from the City of Boston, in Reply to His Apology for Voting for the Fugitive Slave Bill.

In 1851, Boston abolitionist Franklin Dexter fires a devastating broadside at his own representative, Samuel A. Eliot, who had dared to justify his vote for the Fugitive Slave Law to his Boston constituents. Dexter dismantles Eliot's constitutional arguments with meticulous precision, laying bare the moral bankruptcy of a law that transformed Northern citizens into agents of slave-catching. The pamphlet captures the white-hot fury of Northern abolitionists who saw the Compromise of 1850 as a betrayal of everything they believed. This is not dry legal critique but righteous anger channeled into forensic argument: Dexter demands Eliot answer for his 'apology,' interrogating each rationalization until nothing remains but the ugly truth of Northern complicity in human bondage. For readers interested in the moral architecture of the Civil War era, this pamphlet offers a window into how abolitionists understood political betrayal and what they were willing to say publicly about it.