Negro Slavery; Or, A View Of Some Of The More Prominent Features Of That State Of Society, As It Exists In The United States Of America And In The Colonies Of The West Indies, Especially In Jamaica. London: Printed For Hatchard And Son, Piccadilly, And J. And A. Arch, Cornhill; Sold Also By W. Grapel, Church Street, And C. And J. Robinson, Castle Street, Liverpool. 1823. Price Three Shillings. Printed in London by A. and R. Spottiswoode, New-Street-Square, with one page of Contents, followed by 118 pages of text and one leaf at the end about A List of Works containing Important Information on the Subject of Slavery. This is a first edition, published anonymously in 1823, but attributed to Zachary Macaulay and Thomas Cooper. Macaulay (1768 - 1838) was a Scottish statistician and abolitionist who was helped start London University and was a member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a group founded to promote morality in England, and he was a Governor of British Sierra Leone; his father was a clergyman and abolitionist, and Thomas Cooper (1791 or 1792 - 1880) was a clergyman who apparently wrote an excerpt on Jamaica for the book. In 1784 Macaulay emigrated to Jamaica, where he worked as an assistant manager at a sugar plantation and developed a strong antipathy towards slavery. As a consequence, he renounced his job and returned to London to work as a bookkeeper; he became a member of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout the British empire, along with William Wilberforce, a British politician, philanthropist and leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. Eventually slavery was abolished throughout the British empire (1834), and northern states in this country had taken steps to abolish slavery in the early 1800’s, but slavery wasn’t ended in the South until the end of the Civil War. The book is in plain gray wrappers and measures 8 1/4 x 5 3/8 in. wide, with light soiling on the covers and a brown spot on the back cover, light damp stains towards the front of the book, and occasional creases and light wear on the edges. We’ve found just a handful of first editions in Special Collections around the country per WorldCat; there are numerous ebooks and copies on microfilm, and a couple of editions from 1824, but that’s about it. So a rare first edition and an important book on the history of slavery in this country and the West Indies, with strong roots in the abolitionist cause. (See Sabin 52269) #1675