CONWAY, Moncure Daniel.
Testimonies Concerning Slavery.
London: Chapman and Hall , 1864.
$3,500.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152037
+$450
"Striking Off the Shackles of the Mind and Body": First Edition of Moncure Conway's Testimonies Concerning Slavery
First edition of Conway's powerful abolitionist work, published only one year after he left America at the height of the Civil War to continue his fight against slavery in England. Octavo, original publisher's green cloth rebacked with original spine laid down, gilt titles to the spine and front panel, floral ruling stamped in blind to the front and rear panels. In very good condition. Rare.
Moncure Conway, born to a prominent Virginia slaveowner, nevertheless became a powerful abolitionist voice and editor of the antislavery weekly The Commonwealth. With family loyalties splintered at the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1862 Conway "met in Washington D.C. with 33 slaves newly escaped from his father, and resettled them in Ohio." Increasingly anguished by the brutality of war and "nationwide emancipation not fully achieved, Conway determined to leave the country. He did so in April 1863 on the pretext of making a speaking tour in England" (ANB). The next year in London Conway published this partly autobiographical work, Testimonies Concerning Slavery, in which he traces the history of slavery in America and movingly writes: "I take the stand as a witness." Conway was "the most comprehensively radical upper-class white male produced by the antebellum South... The 19th-century's growing an apotheosis in Conway, for whom resistance to all forms of arbitrary authority was life's ultimate purpose. 'Those who think at all,' he said in his memoirs, 'think freely'" (ANB).
Testimonies Concerning Slavery.
$3,500.00
In Stock
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