1001

"So the children were taken away...."

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles Start Price:60.00 USD Estimated At:120.00 - 170.00 USD
 So the children were taken away....
Heartrending Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, sons of a soldier of the Revolution, during a Captivity of more than Twenty Years, among the Slaveholders of Kentucky, one of the so called Christian States of North America. "Dictated by themselves," Boston: 1846. 4 1/2 x 7 1/4, 144 pp., gilt stamped title on ornately blind-embossed caramel cloth. Steel-engraved frontispiece portrait. A shockingly vivid - and violent tale of the writers' experiences in the belly of the slavery beast: "...I saw one slave mother, named Lucy, with seven children, put up by an administrator for sale. At first the mother and three small children were put up together. The purchasers objected; one says, 'I want the woman and the babe, but not the other children'; another says, 'I want that little girl'...So the children were taken away...the mother looking on in perfect agony; and as one child after another came down from the auction block, they would run and cling, weeping, to her clothes....She fainted and fell, with her child in her arms...." Descriptions of their stop in Oberlin, Ohio, a station on the Underground Railroad, a Kentucky "slave-prison," where the owner "tried to keep up 'slaves'] spirits by employing one or two fiddlers to play for them, while they danced over and upon the torn-off fibres of their hearts," and more. Some cover darkening, shelf wear, broken at inner front hinge, portrait leaf loose, some stains and foxing, occasional marginal tears, but in all, good. "The slave narrative, a form of literary memoir that developed as a result of American slavery practices in the 18th and 19th centuries, was used to support abolitionist movements by sympathetic publishers and was popularized by the narratives of prominent African-Americans such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman"--Credit: B&B Rare Books. III Clark 288. Coleman 3031. Dumond 39. LCP 2367. Howes C457. Work 311. An uncommon classic of the genre.