[ABOLITION] 1794 First KY Protest Against Slavery

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Day 2: Early & Historic Americana

By Fleischer's Auctions

Oct 10, 2025

Set Reminder 2025-10-10 09:00:00 2025-10-10 09:00:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : Day 2: Early & Historic Americana https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/fleischers-auctions/day-2-early-historic-americana-19250
Day one of Fleischer's 2025 Fall Premier auction includes early American artifacts, documents, signatures, ephemera, and weaponry. Rare material relating to African American history is featured, as well as fine examples of antique photography. Fleischer's Auctions info@fleischersauctions.com

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• Lot Description

  THE FIRST KENTUCKY PROTEST AGAINST SLAVERY.

   

  David Rice. Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy. Philadelphia and London: M. Gurney, 1783.

   

  12mo, 24 pages. Disbound. FIRST BRITISH EDITION. Dumond p. 98; Eberstadt 135-472 (1804 NY ed.); Evans 24741 & 24742 (1792 eds.); Howes R-246; HRS Kentucky 1797-1810, 18; LCP, Afro-Americana 8855; Sabin 70826.

   

  First British edition of Kentucky's first formal protest against becoming America's next "slave state." The sermon was delivered by Rev. David Rice during the first Kentucky Constitutional Convention, while legislators for the new state were framing their new state's guiding documents. Much like Benjamin Franklin's plea to Congress against slavery just a few years earlier, the counsel to do right fell almost universally on deaf ears.

   

  Rice succinctly pleads: "Holding men in slavery is the national vice of Virginia; and, while a part of that state, we were partakers of the guilt. As a separate state, we are just now come to the birth, and it depends upon our free choice, whether we shall be born in this sin, or innocent of it.”

   

  Preceded by the first edition, printed in Lexington 1792, and then reprinted in Philadelphia the same year, this is the first international edition of the landmark work. New York & Augusta, Maine editions followed in 1804. 

   

  An important early abolitionist work from Kentucky. 

   

  RARE. Only 4 copies of the London edition have sold at auction, the most recent in 1948. All editions rare.

   

  [African Americana, African American History, Black History, Slavery, Enslavement, Abolition, Emancipation] [Pamphlets, Publications, Ephemera, Books, Rare Books, Tracts] [Kentucky, Kentuckiana]

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