From the Stacks: American Slavery As It Is

Title page of American Slavery As It Is, 1839.

In rare books terminology, the term “association copy” is used to describe “a copy…which once belonged to someone connected with the author or someone of interest in his own right…or someone particularly associated with its contents.” The copy of Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery As It Is housed at the Amistad Research Center fits this criteria as an association copy. Formerly owned by abolitionist Lewis Tappan and containing annotations in his hand, it is the association between Weld and Tappan that makes Amistad’s copy all the more interesting.

Theodore Dwight Weld (1803-1895) came from a family of Congregationalist ministers and was one of the leading architects of the abolitionist movement in the United States. He was also responsible for converting Lewis Tappan and his brother, Arthur, into the abolitionist cause. Known as a magnificent orator, Weld lectured widely and often on the topic of slavery until, at the age of 33, his voice gave out. He married the abolitionist and women’s rights activist Angelina Grimke in 1838.

Having lost his oratory skills, Weld turned to publishing as a way of spreading the abolitionist cause. He, along with his wife and her sister, Sarah, began work on a project that would result in the 1839 publication of the compendium work American Slavery As It Is. The trio combed through over twenty thousand copies of Southern newspapers to compile first hand accounts and narratives from slave-holders, freedmen, and others. The book described not only the conditions of slavery, but on the daily aspects of slaves’ lives, such as diet, clothing, housing, work hours, etc. Accuracy was of the utmost importance to Weld and the Grimke sisters; so much so that a committee of prominent abolitionists was selected to verify their materials and work.

Priced at 37 and a half cents, the book sold a hundred thousand copies in its first year and became one of the most influential anti-slavery tracts. It also was used as a source by Harriet Beecher Stowe for the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (see our previous blog entry on Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin). However, American Slavery was published anonymously, as were many of Weld’s works.This anonymity is perhaps one of the reasons that Weld’s name is less known than other abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison.

As mentioned above, Amistad’s copy of American Slavery is an association copy that contains not only Lewis Tappan’s ownership signature, but a small number of interesting annotations in his hand. Descriptions of Tappan’s annotations follow below:

Page 4 annotation reads: “Nov 23/49 J. D. Weld stated to me that with the exception on p 174 he has never heard that any statement in this book has been brought in question.”

On page 174, Weld wrote: “It is also well known that President [Andrew] Jackson was a ‘soul driver,’ and that even so late as the year before the commencement of the last war, he bought up a coffle of slaves and drove them down to Louisiana for sale.”

Tappan wrote two separate annotations regarding Weld’s statement, which read:

“Mr. Weld informs me (Nov 23/49) that the above was stated to him by J. S. Birney who received it from Mr Kingsbury, missionary among the Choctaws; but he has since learned that Gen. Jackson went down the river after a number of slaves, whom he had sold to a person who had not paid for them & who were returned to him.”

“Mr. Weld told me Nov 7/63 that this statement about gen. Jackson is the only one in the book that has ever been denied, to his knowledge.”

Dated ten and twenty-four years after the publication of the book, Tappan’s annotations provide evidence of his association with Weld long after their early communications and work together for the abolitionist cause. They also provide insight into a little know aspect of the public reception accorded to American Slavery following its publication.

Posted by: Christopher Harter

(Images may not be reproduced without permission.)

From the Stacks: A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Title page for the 1853
edition of A Key to Uncle
Tom’s Cabin.

Recently, staff of the Amistad Research Center undertook a major cleaning and shifting of the Center’s library collection. Numbering over 25,000 volumes and containing not only rare and early editions, but a wide spectrum of works covering all aspects of Amistad’s collecting focus, the library collection is an excellent resource for researchers of all ages and interests. The recent work of cleaning and shifting required that staff handle every single volume and has led to some recent “re-discoveries” of interesting and important texts.

To highlight some of these, staff are beginning a “From the Stacks” series on Amistad’s blog, which will occasionally feature one work and discuss not only the publication history of each title, but its significance to the cultural and historical fabric of its era. The focus of our first installment is an important, but often eclipsed work: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly is one of the most well-known anti-slavery works by an American author. First serialized in weekly installments published in the National Era, a Washington, D.C. abolitionist newspaper, between June 5, 1851, and April 1, 1852, the story reached over 50,000 readers prior to its first appearance in book form, when it was published by John P. Jewett & Company of Boston in 1852.

The opening text of Stowe’s Key.

The success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was seen not only in the number of copies sold (300,000 in the first year), but in the response from critics on both sides of the slavery question. While the novel was immediately regarded as an important abolitionist work that exposed the horrors of slavery, Stowe’s writing in many ways provided sympathetic views of both white Southerners and black slaves. (This would later become a focus of much later critical appraisal of the book by literary scholars and historians). However, although Stowe planned to start a novel about life in Maine following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, attacks by pro-slavery critics led her begin efforts to answer those attacks, which claimed that Stowe had exaggerated and falsified her descriptions of life in the South.

Originally intending to write a short document to be added to the next edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s research consumed her. A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded provided examples of real life equivalents to the major characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and gathered sources Stowe used in writing her novel, although some of the sources cited in the Key where read by the author after the publication of her previous book. When completed, her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin totaled over 500 pages of evidence. In a January 6, 1853, letter to the Earl of Shaftsbury, Stowe reported:

“I am now writing a work to be called “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It contains, in an undeniable form, the facts which corroborate all that I have said. One third of it is taken up with judicial records of trials and decisions, and with statute law. It is a a most fearful story, my lord, — I can truly say that I write with life-blood, but as called of God…If they call the fiction dreadful, what will they say of the fact, where I cannot deny, suppress, or color? But it is God’s will that must be told, and I am the unwilling agent.”

A newspaper advertisement from Alabama cited in Stowe’s Key as evidence of slave hunting.

A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1853 by Jewett. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, the reading public preferred fiction to fact, and sales of the Key where only a fraction of those of Stowe’s novel. However, although it is often overshadowed by its precursor, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin gathers not only documentary evidence of life under slavery, but provides an interesting look into the politics of public opinion and its intersection with pro- and anti-slavery sentiments.

An excellent online resource for Uncle Tom’s Cabin is Stephen Railton’s website, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture,” hosted by the University of Virginia. It provides not only text of Stowe’s works, but contemporary responses and information on adaptations of the novel.

Posted by Christopher Harter

(Images from the 1853 edition of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Images may not be reproduced without permission.)