Black Americana and Abolition – 50 – Bauman Rare Books - July 2022 “The Greatest… The Most Devastating Of All Indictments Of Slavery” (Dumond) 84. WELD, Theodore Dwight, GRIMKÉ, Angelina, and GRIMKÉ, Sarah. American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. New York, 1839. Octavo, period-style paper wrappers with original front panel laid down. $3600. First edition of the monumental abolitionist work by Weld and the Grimké sisters that drew upon over 20,000 Southern newspapers to use first-hand accounts and slaveholders’ own words against them, a searing indictment of slavery that Harriet Beecher Stowe virtually memorized, saying she “kept this book in her work basket by day and slept with it under her pillow by night, till its facts crystallized into Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” very scarce in original wrappers. This electrifying 1838 abolitionist work by Timothy Weld, Angelina Grimké and Sarah Grimké “was the most important antislavery publication before Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Lerner, 27). It had such a profound effect on Harriet Beecher Stowe that she “all but memorized American Slavery As It Is, later telling Angelina Grimké that she ‘slept with it under her pillow by night, till its facts crystallized into Uncle Tom’s Cabin’” (Crunden, 94). Occasionally found with “Anti-Slavery Examiner No. 10” (not present here); no priority established. Text generally fresh with light scattered foxing, expert cleaning to first eight leaves.
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