Mar 10, 2011 - Sale 2239

Sale 2239 - Lot 39

Price Realized: $ 5,280
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
WITH A MOUNTED ALBUMEN PORTRAIT OF BROWN (SLAVERY AND ABOLITION)--[BROWN, JOHN] WEBB, RICHARD D. The Life and Letters of Captain John Brown, who was Executed at Charlestown, Virginia, Dec. 2, 1859, for an Armed Attack upon American Slavery. Mounted albumen photographic frontispiece, from an original daguerreotype. 8vo, original blind-stamped cloth, title in gilt on the spine, faded but quite readable; chips to the spine extremities; brown coated end-papers intact. London: Smith Elder, 1859
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Additional Details

first edition. rare, only two copies coming to auction in the last 32 years. The editor, Richard Webb, a noted Irish Quaker abolitionist, was the first to write a biography that included a number of letters from Brown, written from prison. The frontispiece, an original albumen print, was made from a now lost daguerreotype. The image of Brown, tight-lipped with the fire of righteousness in his eyes, was captured by Benjamin Battels on the eve of the Pottawatamie Massacre in August of 1855. Brown was at this time en route to join his sons in Kansas. There they would face the violent prelude to Civil War, in what would later be called "Bloody Kansas."