Two Sermons on the Kind Treatment and on the Emancipation of Slaves. Preached at Mobile, on Sunday the 10th, and Sunday the 17th of May, 1840
Boston: William Crosby and Company, 1840. Original Wrappers. Good binding. Item #9236
Octavo. 30, [2] pp. First edition. As issued, stitched in publisher's printed wrappers (rear wrapper lacking). Foxing throughout; rear blank leaf with creasing; minor dampstaining to the final few leaves; faint rippling throughout; front wrapper with some chipping to edges is detached but present with owner name at the top.
Text of two sermons delivered before a congregation of Alabama enslavers by Simmons, a New England-born Unitarian minister and brother-in-law of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Though exceedingly moderate in message and tone, these sermons resulted in Simmons's expulsion from Mobile under threat of bodily harm. In fact, Simmons expressed no solidarity with the northern Abolitionist movement, which he regarded as recklessly overzealous and whose "spirit," he said, "offended" him: "I wish not to be considered as expressing fellowship, or entering into alliance of any sort, with Abolitionism . . . it is easy to be an abolitionist; but it is very difficult to be a humane, a judicious, a disinterested , slaveholder" (p. vii-viii). Uncommon, with only two copies traced in commerce since the mid-20th century. Afro-Americana 9421; Sabin 81163; American Imprints 40-6135.
Price: $500.00