Black Americana and Abolition – 46 – Bauman Rare Books - July 2022 Important First Edition Of 19th-Century Abolitionist Lysander Spooner’s Address Of The Free Constitutionalists, Issued With The Nation On The Brink Of War 77. SPOONER, Lysander. Address of the Free Constitutionalists to the People of the United States. Boston, 1860. Octavo, original beige paper wrappers. $3200. First edition of Spooner’s seminal Address issued in the wake of Dred Scott, calling on Americans to “correct the frauds of the past, and interpret our constitution by the same rules by which it ought to have been interpreted from the first,” chief among his provocative works heralding “the commitment to individual liberty that lies at the heart of America’s supreme law.” As the nation edged toward war, a “radical abolitionist reading of the Constitution began to emerge,” holding the Constitution did not “sanction slavery—it outlawed it… the most sustained version of the thesis was developed by Spooner” (Knowles, 36). Historians increasingly view Spooner as a core theorist in heralding “the commitment to individual liberty that lies at the heart of America’s supreme law” (Knowles, 62). Title page with small faint library inkstamp, tracings of faint inked notation. Text very fresh with only tiny bit of edge-wear to front wrappers, mere trace of soiling. A very scarce near-fine copy. “In This Boasted Land Of Civil And Religious Liberty, Writhing Under The Lash” 78. STEWARD, Austin. Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman. Rochester, New York, 1857. Octavo, original olive cloth. $3200. First edition of the exceedingly scarce autobiography of the once-enslaved Black abolitionist, who became a Black suffrage leader in New York, documenting the brutality of his life in slavery, his fight for Black rights in the North, and his role as leader of Canada’s Wilberforce colony, with engraved frontispiece portrait and four full-page illustrations, in original cloth. Steward’s Twenty-Two Years a Slave stands out as the vivid, unsparing autobiography of an enslaved, then free, Black American whose life crisscrossed the South, the North and Canada. An activist throughout his life, he was a leading vocal opponent of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. First edition, first printing, with title page verso with “A. Strong & Co., Printers,” “Colvin & Crowell, Stereotypers.” Interior generally fresh with light scattered foxing, minimal edge-wear to unrestored cloth. A handsome near-fine copy.
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