American Historical Ephemera and Photography, Featuring African Americana

8 x 6 1/4 in. pages bound in brown paper covering with blue ribbon (separations, loss to extremities, brown paper covering very brittle). Covering unfolds to reveal ink inscription reading "Last day Sermon Isiah [sic] 58:1. Cry aloud, spare not &c. J. Romeyn Berry. Kinderhook Sept. 26. 1861."

22 page manuscript sermon begins with a transcription of Isaiah 58:1, "Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgressions and the house of Jacob their sins." 

Near the end of the sermon, Berry deals with the evil of slavery, writing, in part: "Only convince the community that the words of God sanctions the principle of American Slavery and you have done two things - You have degraded the Gospel below the standard of the Deists religion, and you have prepared men for all sorts of wrongs and violence toward each other. For if I have a right under whatever pretence to rob an innocent man of his liberty and his labor of his wife and his children, then what have I not a right to rob him of!...That the South should strive to sustain such a code is not strange for flesh and blood and souls even of slaves have become 4 times as valuable & profitable now as they were 30 years ago. But that the free south would be defiled with a widespread desperate effort to justify and canonize wrong is one of the wonders and curiosities of the century."

Reverend J. Romeyn Berry offered the prayer and tribute at President Martin Van Buren's funeral services at Lindenwald in 1862.