?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(SLAVERY & ABOLITION.) George W. Clark. The Liberty Minstrel. 184, [3] pages. 12mo, publisher's gilt cloth, minimal wear; moderate foxing, a few contemporary pencil marks, minimal wear to contents; early owner inscriptions and bookplate on front endpapers and title page. New York, 1844
First of several editions of a popular abolitionist songbook, with words from many popular poets of the day set to music by the compiler George Washington Clark (1811-1893).
This is the first book publication of James Russell Lowell's "Rouse Up, New England" (pages 70-72), which is here credited to "a Yankee," and had appeared in the Boston Courier on 19 March 1844 under the title "A Rallying-Cry for New-England, Against the Annexation of Texas." See Chamberlain, Bibliography of the First Printings of James Russell Lowell, pages 16-17; and the 2017 "Uncollected Poems of James Russell Lowell," pages 42-43. Lowell's previously published "Are Ye Truly Free?" also appears on pages 126-127, credited. Other poets whose work appears here include John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry W. Longfellow, and Lydia Sigourney; two are from Jesse Hutchinson of the famed Hutchinson Family Singers. Two songs are credited to unnamed enslaved people: "Song of the Coffle Gang . . . Words by the Slaves" and "Stolen We Were, Words by a Colored Man." Afro-Americana 2345; Sabin 13289. We trace none of any edition at auction since another first edition appeared in 1924.
Provenance: original owner George Washington Reynolds (1818-1895), an abolitionist editor and bookseller of Franklin, NY, who signed the title page; sold the following year to Avery T. Northrup (1813-1892) of Otego and Franklin, NY, who inscribed the front free endpaper, and whose trade card as an instructor of phonography (shorthand) is mounted to the front pastedown; given to his wife Almina Northrup in 1889 per inscription on front free endpaper.
