BLACK HISTORY & LITERATURE WOMEN LITERATURE EARLY 2020 ONLINE CATALOGUE CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AMERICANA ART & ARCHITECTURE SCIENCE & MEDICINE ECONOMICS HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION TRAVEL & EXPLORATION PASTIMES Black History & Literature 2 ©2020 Bauman Rare Books www.baumanrarebooks.com 1-800-97-BAUMAN (1-800-972-2862) B B L “The First American Martyr To The A A Freedom Of The Press, And The Freedom U C Of The Slave” (John Quincy Adams) M K A (LOVEJOY, Elijah P.) LOVEJOY, Joseph C. and Owen. Memoir of the Rev. N H Elijah P. Lovejoy; Who Was Murdered in Defence of the Liberty of the I Press, At Alton, Illinois, Nov. 7, 1837. With an Introduction by John R S Quincy Adams. New York, 1838. Octavo, original gray cloth. $3200. A T R View on Website O E R First edition of the publisher and editor’s memoir, issued the year after his Y murder, only two years after he denounced the lynching by fire of a free B black man, as an act of “savage barbarity,” a seminal record of key event in O & America’s abolitionist battle and the history of the First Amendment. O K Elijah Lovejoy, who was born in Maine, began publishing the abolitionist Observer after L S he moved to St. Louis. When, in 1836, a mob dragged Francis McIntosh, a free black I man accused of murder, from the St. Louis jail and set him on fire, killing him, “Lovejoy’s T Observer described the lynching by fire as an ‘awful murder and savage barbarity’… [and] • E attacked Judge Luke Lawless” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Lawless, who presided over the R grand jury investigating the lynching of McIntosh, had “declared that such actions by E A ‘the many—of the multitude… is beyond the reach of human law!’… [and] made it clear A T that he blamed abolitionist agitators… With this judicial encouragement, vandals entered R U the Observer office on three or four occasions… Prophetically, Lovejoy pointed out that L R Lawless’ reasoning would allow a mob to destroy the Observer, kill its editor, and escape Y E punishment’” (Kielbowicz, “Law and Mob Law,” in Law and History Review V.24, 587-88). After mobs destroyed his shop a third time, “Lovejoy moved the Observer to nearby 2 Alton, Illinois, only to see the violence against him and his press escalate… he died, five 0 bullets in his heart, while defending his fourth press from an armed, arsonist mob… 2 Lovejoy’s murder marked a turning point in Northern attitudes regarding the antislavery 0 movement’s print tactics; no longer perceived as a dangerous criminal act, abolitionist print agitation was for the most part tolerated—however grudgingly—as a recognized O form of free speech appropriate to a healthy democracy… that the editor’s murder, N like that of McIntosh, was followed by highly suspicious judicial pandering to the Slave L Power only reinforced abolitionist efforts to associate antislavery with both freedom of I expression and trial by jury” (DeLombard, Slavery on Trial, 57). N When verdicts were handed down in the Alton case, both the abolitionists who tried to defend Lovejoy’s press Coincidentally or not, this also marked the Court’s first application of the 14th Amendment to strike down state E and the members of the mob who attacked it were acquitted or had their cases dropped. “Within days of the restrictions that violated the First Amendment’s press clause” (Kielbowicz, 595-600). With introduction by John Alton verdicts, Abraham Lincoln, then a young attorney in Springfield, lamented the ‘mobocratic spirit… now Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president and a leading abolitionist who, in 1841, successfully defended the abroad in the land.’ In a prophetic speech, Lincoln identified the ‘growing disposition to substitute the wild and enslaved Africans before the Supreme Court in the case of United States v. The Amistad. Here Adams writes: furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of the Courts’ as the principal threat to the survival of American “That an American citizen, in a state whose Constitution repudiates all Slavery, should die a martyr in defence political institutions” and, in a reference to Lovejoy, he also spoke harshly of those who “throw printing presses [sic] of the freedom of the press, is a phenomenon in the history of this Union.” Lovejoy, he declares, was “the into rivers, [and] shoot editors.’” Scholar Michael Kent Curtis has credited “abolitionists’ free-speech efforts with first American Martyr to the freedom of the press, and the freedom of the slave.” Co-authored by Joseph C. breathing meaning into abstract notions of freedom of expression and laying the foundation for First and 14th Lovejoy and Owen Lovejoy, with extensive writings by Elijah Lovejoy and vital witness accounts. Sabin 42366. Amendment doctrines that matured in the 20th century.” There remains, nevertheless, a key aspect of the debate Blockson 3366. This copy contains lightly penciled presentation inscriptions on both front and rear blank over free speech that endorses “the view that communities should have some control over ideas disseminated leaves, reportedly by the wife of co-author Joseph C. Lovejoy, to: “Anna and E.H. Lakeman presented by Mrs. in their midst,” supported as a form of nuisance law. “Not until 1931 did the U.S. Supreme Court, in Near v. Sarah Lovejoy.” Interior very fresh with faintest occasional foxing, mere trace of dampstaining at the rear, very Minnesota, rule out the use of public nuisance as a basis for silencing a publication that agitated a community. mild edgewear, minimal soiling to original cloth. Near-fine. 3 ©2020 Bauman Rare Books www.baumanrarebooks.com 1-800-97-BAUMAN (1-800-972-2862) B B L A A U C M K A N H I R S A T R O E R Y B O & O K L S I T • E R E A A T R U L R Y E 2 “A Systematic Rebuttal Of The Most Common Objections To Abolition” 0 2 (SLAVERY) TREADWELL, Seymour Boughton. American Liberties and American Slavery. Morally and Politically Illustrated. New-York, 1838. 0 Octavo, original brown cloth. $2800. View on Website O N First edition of this abolitionist’s treatise emphasizing the slaveholders’ plenty of focus. Treadwell was a ‘one-idea man,’ and that idea was the eradication of L muzzling of the democratic process by preventing public discussions of slavery, slavery… Meanwhile, he farmed in Leoni Township… according to his daughter, he used I the farm for a more secretive purpose—aiding fugitive slaves as a station along the in the original cloth, with the bookplate of the Anti-Slavery Library. N Underground Railroad” (Jackson Citizen Patriot). “Originally a backer of Henry Clay’s colonization scheme, Treadwell evolved into an E “In 1838, Treadwell, an obscure non-lawyer abolitionist, devoted a book to slavery and advocate of abolition, the most extreme of the anti-slavery positions… Treadwell’s its relation to American liberty. The centerpiece of the book was a defense of freedom of 1837 Independence Day address to an anti-slavery group prompted suggestions that expression, a concept he distinguished from the ‘loose… idea of a licentious liberty’… he publish his abolition arguments. Selling his business, he moved to Rochester, where Treadwell suggested the right to free speech was a national right protected by the he penned the book American Liberties and American Slavery Morally and Politically Federal Constitution. Southerners were able to express pro-slavery sentiments in the Illustrated, a systematic rebuttal of the most common objections to abolition. That North and should be protected in that right, for they were ‘American citizens, still under book, published in May 1838, gave Treadwell national standing. About a year after the… American constitution’” (Michael Kent Curtis, “The Curious History of Attempts its publication, he was invited by the Michigan Anti-Slavery Society to visit Jackson. to Suppress Anti-Slavery Speech, Press, and Petition in 1835-37,” in Northwestern The group had organized in Ann Arbor in 1836. But Jackson, a few months prior to University Law Review, Vol. 89, No. 3, page 865). Contemporary bookplate of the Anti- Treadwell’s visit, had given birth to the state’s first anti-slavery newspaper, the American Slavery Library. Some dampstaining to first few and last few leaves, chiefly marginal; Freeman. The paper failed after three issues, and Treadwell was invited to revive it… light rubbing to binding. A very good copy in original cloth. Filled with lengthy letters, essays and full-page speech transcripts, the Freeman had 4 ©2020 Bauman Rare Books www.baumanrarebooks.com 1-800-97-BAUMAN (1-800-972-2862) B B L “The Fruit Of Slavery… The Consequence Of A A Withholding From Men Their Liberty” U C M K MCCUNE SMITH, James. A Lecture on the Haytien Revolutions; With a Sketch of the Character of A Toussaint L’Ouverture. Delivered at the Stuyvesant Institute, (For the Benefit of the Colored Orphan N H Asylum,) February 26, 1841. New-York, 1841. Slim octavo, modern blue cloth. $4800. I View on Website R S A First edition of a landmark early history of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, delivered in 1841 by T R O McCune Smith—“the African American tradition’s first man of letters” (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)—arguing, in effect, that E R the “racist mythology about Africans that was created to justify and perpetuate slavery… destroys the foundations Y of freedom,” with frontispiece map of “Hayti or St Domingo.” B To historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., James McCune Smith stands “as the African American tradition’s first man of letters, its O & first intellectual and its first professional writer… he was one of the few black men or women before whom the great Frederick O Douglass would bow” (Foreword in Stauffer, ed.