Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, Including Americana

Providence, Rhode Island: John Carter, 1774. The Sixth Edition, correction and improved (second American edition). 8vo. 19th-century library cloth, soiling; minor soiling throughout; marginal soiling in prelim gutters; front free endpaper disbound; pages trimmed to margins. Provenance: City of New York Association of the Bar Library (institutional stamp to title-page). Bailyn 44n; Church 880; ESTC W31881; Evans 13185; Harvard Law Catalogue 335; Sabin 10819; Sowerby 2702-3; Sweet & Maxwell I:154-5; Viorst, Great Documents of Western Civilization 112

Scarce second American edition, printed on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

English Liberties was first printed in London, ca. 1682, to educate the average English subject with the documents and information necessary to understand their rights, famously describing the Magna Carta as "Declaratory of the principal grounds of the Fundamental Laws and Liberties of England." The first North American printing of English Liberties was executed in Philadelphia in 1721 by James Franklin, under whose younger brother Benjamin, the printer of John Carter, apprenticed in the 1760s. After leaving Franklin's employ, Carter became editor of The Providence Gazette. In 1772 he played an active role in inflaming tensions against the British through his reporting of the Gaspee Affair, an incident in which the HMS Gaspee was set ablaze by Rhode Island colonists who were angered by the increasingly aggressive tactics used by British soldiers in enforcing the Navigation Acts. Though the incident was barely remarked upon initially, Carter reported on British plans to arrest persons suspected to be involved and then transport them 3,009 miles across the Atlantic to England to stand trial. Rhode Island ultimately led the nation in calling for independence from British rule, having been the first to formally renounce British rule and to call for the creation of a Continental Congress. The present edition was printed shortly after the Boston Tea Party and a few months before the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774.

The subscriber's list includes numerous persons who would ultimately play roles in the American Revolutionary War, among them Major Andrew Backus, Captain John Fisk, Captain Jabez Huntington, and Rhode Island deputy governor Darius Sessions. English Liberties is credited as having “had more to do with preparing the minds of American colonists for the American Revolution than the larger but less accessible works of Coke, Sidney and Locke." (Hudson, William Penn’s English Liberties, pp. 580-85).