As part of its Black History Month coverage, The Nation has assembled an impressive list of essays its published in over the past 136 years. Some contributors: W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin…

Here’s an 1866 essay by Octavius Brooks Frothingham, a minister and the author of several books on prominent abolitionists, in which he pays tribute to the passing of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery paper. An excerpt:

There was a stern monotony in its issues that was like the pressure of fate. It was an unvarying soliloquy thirty-five years long. Line upon line, precept upon precept, was its rule and method. Other matters found place in its columns but they never distracted attention from this. The poetry was somewhat lacking in poetic art, but it was all inspired by anti-slavery conviction. The literary criticism was not delicate, but it was always honest and earnest. Many of the contributions were rough in style and crude in thought, but they were contributions to the main cause. Every strange reform found a voice in its columns, but their currents came in as tributary streams to swell the tide of moral sentiment which was to carry away the one gigantic wrong of slavery.

Interesting — though sometimes infuriating — reads, all…

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