Waiting for the Perfect Moment: Abby Kelley Foster and Stephen Foster’s Union War

As it had done for decades, the abolitionist community of Massachusetts assembled near Framingham to commemorate the Fourth of July in the summer of 1861. In years past, the air at the pastoral grove had been ripe with denunciations of the Union—the American system of government that, under the Constitution, sanctioned chattel slavery. It was at Framingham that the leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, William Lloyd Garrison, had burned the Constitution seven years earlier to unanimous approval from the attendees. In 1861, however, the wafting winds carried the sounds of cacophony rather than of unison. With the onset