Mar 10, 2011 - Sale 2239

Sale 2239 - Lot 34

Price Realized: $ 1,680
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
THE FIRST STUDY OF PHIADELPHIA'S COLORED POPULATION (SLAVERY AND ABOLITION.) [BACON, BENJAMIN AND CHARLES GARDNER.] The Present State and Condition of the Free people of Color of the City of Philadelphia. 40 pages. 8vo, modern marbled paper-covered boards with morocco label up the spine; faint signs of an early pencil note on title-page and stamp "D" possibly from a library, but with no additional signs. Philadelphia: by the Society, 1838

Additional Details

first edition, of the first of three early studies of Philadelphia's free black population. Bacon and Gardner's study anticipated W. E. B. Du Bois's later monumental work, The Philadelphia Negro. This pamphlet was a distillation of a four-volume census study made by Bacon and Gardner in 1838. "It is amazing that successive sociological studies of the Negro community should have been made so early. . . the accuracy and completeness of which was do to the access the latter (Gardner), a Philadelphia Negro, had to his own people." Negro History 1553-1903, #157; not in Blockson or Sabin; Afro-Americana, 7612.