[Rarebooks] fa: [SLAVE NARRATIVE] LIFE & OPINIONS OF JULIUS MELBOURN 1847 (Dinner with Thomas Jefferson, etc.)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, March 1. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/q2x237e

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


Life and Opinions of Julius Melbourn; With Sketches of the Lives and Characters of Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, John Randolph, and Several Other Eminent American Statesmen. Edited by a Late Member of Congress. Syracuse: Hall & Dickson, 1847. FIRST EDITION. Original publisher's blind-stamped cloth with title in gilt to the spine; 239 pp.; frontispiece. Blockson Afro-American Collection 9645; Howes M487.

First edition of this important and controversial slave narrative. Born a slave in Wake County, North Carolina, in 1790, Julius was sold at the age of five to the widow Melbourn, who emancipated him, gave him her name, educated him in her late husband's extensive library, and left him a sizable inheritance at her death in 1809. Melbourn traveled extensively in the South and North, residing for awhile in New Orleans and New England before finally emigrating to England, "unwilling to spend my days in a country which enslaved and treated as goods and chattel—as brutes—at least one-sixth part of its inhabitants." In 1815, he met and dined with Thomas Jefferson, the only African-American man of his era to do so. The work also contains descriptions of James Madison, James Monroe, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and other notables, as well as Melbourn's thoughts on the American Colonization Society, the annexation of Texas, the Tariff Bill of 1846, etc. "The life of Julius Melbourn is about as interesting as one can  find in the period" (John Hope Franklin: The Free Negro in North Carolina 1790-1860). Upon its publication, the book caused a storm of controversy, with Southern newspapers deriding it as an abolitionist literary hoax perpetrated by the book's editor, Jabez Delano Hammond, and doubts still remain as to its authenticity.

Corners bumped and showing, wear to the spine ends, cloth splitting at the spine and front joint, binding slightly shaken but secure; contents with scattered foxing throughout, as is common with American imprints of the period, a few finger stains. Front flyleaf with the early/original owner's signature of "Nancy Beecher [of] Livonia" and the inscription:  "Presented Sophia Jefferson by Nancy Beecher, Livonia."