?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(RELIGION.) Greensbury W. Offley. God's Immutable Declaration of his own Moral and Assumed Natural Image. Numerous woodcut illustrations including a portrait of the author on the front wrapper and title page. 30, [1] pages. 8vo, original illustrated wrappers, minor wear and faint dampstaining; minor foxing. New Bedford, MA, 1875
The author Greensbury W. Offley (1808-1896) was born into slavery in Maryland, and bought out of servitude at an early age by his father, a free Black man. Raised in poverty, by his own account in this pamphlet he "never went to school a day in his life, and only commenced to learn his letters at about nineteen years and eight months old." He made his way to Hartford, CT in 1835, became a Methodist minister, and published "A Narrative of the Life and Labors of the Rev. G. W. Offley."
The present work offers an Afrocentric perspective on the Bible: it argues that God appeared to Daniel in the form of a Black man, discusses the Ethiopian wife of Moses, and notes that "the European nation or powers . . . have robbed Africa of untold millions of dollars. Hundreds of thousands of the lives of our race have been lost by that great sword." He also recounts his family's first Bible, acquired in 1828: "Not one of all the family could read the Bible except myself, and that a very little. . . . No black person was allowed to be seen reading it, and $20 fine if any white person was known to teach a black his alphabet." The pamphlet concludes with a page of endorsements of Offley's character by several New England clergymen from 1852 to 1866, and Harriet Beecher Stowe adds "Mr. Offley is a well-known and much respected citizen of Hartford." OCLC only shows two of an earlier circa 1872 broadside printing, and two of this pamphlet printing. Neither traced at auction.
