Mar 18, 2010 - Sale 2207

Sale 2207 - Lot 26

Price Realized: $ 3,600
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(AMERICAN REVOLUTION.) Hancock, John. An Oration; Delivered March 5, 1774, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston: To Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March 1770. 4to, modern cloth; lacks half-title, early repairs to edges of 3 leaves including title page, upper corner torn from first 3 leaves with loss of page numbers and a few words, unevenly trimmed along bottom edge with loss of a catchword, creased and moderately dampstained. Boston, 1774
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first edition. An important oration on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, delivered on the eve of revolution, and unsparing in its rhetoric. "Satan with his chosen band open'd the sluices of New-England's blood. . . . Let every parent tell the shameful story to his listening children till tears of pity glisten in their eyes, and boiling passion shakes their tender frames." Addressing the perpetrators, he asks, "Tell me, ye bloody butchers, ye villains high and low . . . do not the injured shades of Maverick, Grays, Caldwell, Attucks and Carr attend you in your solitary walks, arrest you even in the midst of your debaucheries, and fill even your dreams with terror?"
Authorship of this thunderous oration is disputed, with some sources crediting Samuel Adams or Samuel Cooper. "In all probability a number of Boston radicals had a hand in its composition"--Adams, American Independence 117a. Evans 13314; Sabin 30177.