(CROMWELL LIBRARY) Howard Carroll Twelve Americans Their Liv

Sale 2562 - Lot 185

Unsold

Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750

(CROMWELL LIBRARY.) Howard Carroll. Twelve Americans: Their Lives and Times. 12 portrait plates including Frederick Douglass, most with titles on verso. xii, [2], 473, 6 pages including publisher's ads. 12mo, publisher's cloth, moderate wear, rebacked with most of original backstrip laid down; moderate wear to endpapers, otherwise minimal wear to contents; inscribed in Cromwell's hand "A present from Frederick Douglass to J.W. Cromwell" on front free endpaper. New York, 1883

Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

A collection of short biographies of Frederick Douglass and eleven white men whose reputations today range from moderately well-known (Peter Cooper, rival vice presidents Hamlin and Stephens, Charles Francis Adams) to completely forgotten. The Douglass portrait is sympathetic and admiring, and concludes "It is doubtful if any man, in any country, commencing so low, ever climbed so high as did Frederick Douglass."

In 1881, John Wesley Cromwell founded the Bethel Literary and Historical Association to serve Washington's small but growing Black intelligentsia. Frederick Douglass attended some of these meetings. Douglass was apparently proud enough of his profile in Twelve Americans to give it as a gift, and impressed enough with John Wesley Cromwell to make him a recipient. Afro-Americana 2091.

John Wesley Cromwell (1846-1927) was born into slavery in Portsmouth, VA, and went on to a long and distinguished career as a journalist, editor, historian, and activist. This and the following 12 lots descended through his daughter Otelia Cromwell (1874-1972), a noted literary scholar; and granddaughter Adelaide M. Cromwell (1919-2019), an important sociologist.