African Americana

The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament. London: Printed by R. Taylor and Co, for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808. FIRST EDITION.

2 volumes, 8vo. 3 engravings, of which 2 are folding, including the infamous illustration of a slave ship's cargo, a cartographic representation of abolition thought, and an illustration of manacles. (Occasional brown spotting, mostly to plates, short tears with repairs to gutter of slave ship plate.) Modern brown calf gilt, smooth spine gilt in 6 compartments, gilt-lettered in 3 (cracking at joints, light scuffing). Provenance: J. Bennett (stamps to title pages); Karl-Ferdinand Schaedler (bookplates to inner boards); F.R. Thorold, Johannesburg (embossed bookseller stamp to front free endpaper). 

FIRST EDITION of the seminal history of the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition by Thomas Clarkson, a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire. A founding member of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, he campaigned extensively until the passage of the 1807 Slave Trade Act which ended the trade. The work here includes the infamous diagram of the slave ship Brookes, first published in 1791, and used by Clarkson and William Wilberforce in their abolition campaigns. 

Tipped in between pages 110 & 111 is a manuscript 2-page "Extract of a letter from Dr. Franklin to Mr. Wright-London", originally written on 20 November 1789, Benjamin Franklin opens: "I wish success to your endeavours for obtaining an abolition of the slave trade." Cited at the end as p.260 from Vol. I of Franklin's Private correspondence. Bound in at the end of volume II is a manuscript 4-page copy of a letter written by Thomas Clarkson on 25 September 1841 to Richard Allen, Secretary to the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society, Dublin. Goldsmiths' 19725; Kress B.5319; Sabin 13486.