The Child's Book on Slavery; or, Slavery Made Plain

Brown blind embossed cloth 12mo with faded gilt spine; 143, (1), (8)pp. Later issue of the first edition, with rear ads dated 1859. Engraved frontispiece and 15 in-text illustrations, several by Horace Grosvenor, to whom authorship is erroneously attributed in modern reproductions. The text was written by William De Loss Love (1819-1898), an abolitionist clergyman who served in the U.S. Christian Commission during the Civil War and was active in the Freedmen’s Bureau.

A major work of abolitionist juvenile literature published anonymously for the American Reform Tract and Book Society, which aimed to produce anti-slavery literature that was instructive to adults as well as children. Instead of providing a narrative in which a child encounters slavery and realizes its evil, The Child’s Book explicitly addresses the manifestations of its cruelty and the systems of power that perpetuate it. It uses real narratives, including the story of Frederick Douglass and details State-by-State laws, to factualize and remove any ambiguity about the situation, refuting myths of the "kind slave-holder” and arguments for Biblical precedent. The illustrations include a harrowing depiction of a "slave pen" in Washington, D.C. (frontis), and a brutal auction scene where a child is ripped away from their mother.

A Good copy only with loss around the crown of the spine, fortunately not affecting the text. Some foxing and fingersoil, lacking ffep with pencil inscriptions to the endpaper and blank verso of the frontis. A complete copy, with an unsettling story of its unusual damage: according to the dealer the book was purchased from, it once belonged to a woman with a pet bird, and set atop a stack of books next to the bird’s cage, who pecked away at it from inside.

Rare in commerce, RBH shows the title once in an 1899 catalogue. (Dumond, Antislavery in America, p. 38)