Observations On the Inslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes… The Uncertainty of a Death Bed Repentance (with two other titles)

8vo, original bull sheep with four raised boards, iii-viii, 280,168, 16pp. Benezet title is bound at the end (16 pp.). Binding very worn and rubbed, hinges weak, binding slightly warped, missing endpapers, pages 53-56 are torn, page 5 and 6 is torn in half in Harley’s A Discourse on Mistakes Concerning Religion, last page chipped and folded a bit, but with no material impact on text, internally somewhat, soiled, foxed and aged. Anthony Benezet (1713-1784) was born into a French Huguenot family that moved to London when he was two years old. At seventeen, his family moved to Philadelphia, and he became a Quaker. He became a teacher and established the first public school for girls in America, and along the way he managed to teach slave children from his home. In 1770, with the help of the Quakers, he set up the Negro School at Philadelphia, which he taught at until his death. The current work has the distinction of being one of the earliest and most important anti-slavery efforts printed in America before the Revolutionary War. Also bound with this track is Benezet’s The Uncertainty of A Death Bed Repentance, Thomas Bromley’s The Way to the Sabbath of Rest, and Thomas Hartley’s A Discourse of Mistakes Concerning Religion. It appears the tracts were printed by Christopher Sauer in Germantown.