Memoires sur la Vie d'Antoine Benezet.
London: 1824. iv,[2],88pp. Early 20th-century brown morocco, gilt leather label, elaborate dentelles. Bookplate on front pastedown. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Minor toning and foxing, untrimmed. Very good. Item #5411
French translation of the Memoirs of the Life of Anthony Benezet, originally published in Philadelphia, 1817. Anthony Benezet was a French immigrant to Philadelphia who became a prominent Quaker leader, teacher, early abolitionist, and author of several 18th-century, anti-slavery works. The present copy bears a warm presentation inscription from Vaux to Dr. Caspar Morris, a Philadelphia physician. Morris (1805-1884) was connected with several medical institutions including the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind and the Episcopal Hospital.
"Benezet found his calling in teaching, a profession that would bring him significant personal satisfaction throughout his life as a result of his belief that education offered a means of reforming an increasingly competitive society.... After two decades of offering free evening classes for black students in his home, in 1770 he persuaded the Society of Friends to open an 'Africans’ School.' Although the school’s enrollment was rather low, a number of Benezet’s students—among them Absalom Jones and James Forten—became important leaders of Philadelphia’s black community.... From the 1750s until his death, amid numerous other reform projects, Benezet actively pursued an abolitionist campaign that began in Pennsylvania and soon extended across the Atlantic.... While he continued abolitionist work in Philadelphia, in 1759 he began to publish a series of influential antislavery tracts that soon reached an international audience. In A Short Account of That Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes (1762), a pamphlet that was later translated into French and German, he directly challenged assertions of innate black inferiority" - ANB.
Price: $950