GIFT FROM AN A.M.E. MINISTER, JUST WEEKS AFTER THE CIVIL WAR (CROMWELL LIBRARY.) John Gihon. Geary and Kansas. 348 pages. 12mo, publisher's cloth, moderate wear; moderate toning and minor foxing; gift inscriptions on front endpapers, one of them to John Wesley Cromwell. Philadelphia, 1857
This volume bears a gift inscription by the Rev. Jeremiah R.V. Thomas (circa 1835-after 1880), a significant African Methodist Episcopalian minister in the years following the Civil War, in Portsmouth and later in Baltimore and New Orleans. The book was given to John Wesley Cromwell (1846-1927), who had been freed from slavery as a young boy in 1851, graduated in 1864 from the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, and then in 1865 returned to the town where he had been enslaved, Portsmouth, VA, where he opened his own school. During this period, weeks after the close of the Civil War, Rev. Thomas inscribed the book "J. Wesley Cromwell, presented by Rev. J.R.V. Thomas, Portsmouth, Va., June 8, 1865." The subject, the recent history of abolitionist ferment in Kansas, would have likely been of interest to the aspiring young political activist and historian. Sabin 27338.
Provenance: family of John Wesley Cromwell (1846-1927) through his daughter Otelia Cromwell (1874-1972), a noted literary scholar; granddaughter Adelaide M. Cromwell (1919-2019), an important sociologist.
