Whipple, Dr. Charles K. Relation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to Slavery

Boston, Massachusetts: R.F. Wallcut, 1861. First Edition. Good. 7½" x 4 5/8". Paper wrappers. Pp. 247. Good due to wrappers detached save for a small ex-library sticker to bottom of spine; internally very good plus with just a touch of scattered spotting. Inscribed on title page by Aaron M. and Anna Rice Powell.

This is a special presentation copy of a noted treatise which condemned the Christian institution of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) for its decidedly un-Christian-like ties to slaveholding groups. The book was inscribed by an important abolitionist and activist couple, Aaron Macy and Anna Rice Powell.

The work was written by Charles K. Whipple, a leader with the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and coeditor (with William Lloyd Garrison) of the noted abolitionist newspapers The Non-Resistant and The Liberator. The author bemoaned that the ABCFM, at their annual meeting in 1860, had declared the Cherokee Nation to be "a Christian people." ABCFM had begun missionary work among the Cherokee in 1817, when "they were a pagan nation, and also a slaveholding nation . . . But their habit of slaveholding remains unchanged." Whipple chastised the Board, who chose not only "not to preach against slaveholding" but also "openly declared slaveholders to be Christians, admitting them to their churches indiscriminately with others."

This copy was inscribed on the title page to "Mr. and Mrs. Washburn, with the cordial regards of Aaron M. and Anna Rice Powell." The Powells had gotten married without a minister or public official, per the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States, in "united protest against the inequality and injustice of the statutes of the civil code pertaining to marriage, which assign to the wife a position of legal inferiority." They served in leadership capacities for various anti-slavery societies, as well as organizations focused on women's rights and suffrage. Anna wrote a letter to President Lincoln urging him to free the slaves who had helped fight for the Union, and Aaron penned that he had read "with great satisfaction" Garrison's statement of "the principles and objects of the Am. Anti Slavery Society" published in the Liberator. It is clear, through comparison to a digitized version of Aaron's signature found online, that Aaron wrote the inscription on the present work. We were unable to discover the exact identity of the recipients, but we imagine it either to be relatives (Anna's mother's maiden name was Washburn) or Ichabod Washburn, the noted abolitionist and philanthropist. He helped found Lincoln College, now known as Washburn University, which enrolled women and one African American man in its inaugural class in 1865.

Reasonably well-represented in institutions, this a powerful presentation copy.