George Washington. [Memorandum Book]. (Mount Vernon, 1799).

One of the most treasured artifacts of the Library, this book records the personal expenditures of our first president up until his death in December 1799. As one might expect, it is filled with references to the African-American members of the Mount Vernon community, both free and unfree. Washington was a lifelong slaveowner, but at the end of his life he boldly manumitted his 123 slaves and stipulated in his will that the children he was liberating must also be educated (he was legally unable to free the 153 who belonged to his wife). Here the page is open to a notation for the receipt of $25 for a runaway slave named Cesar.

Guillaume Thomas Francois Raynal. Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens & du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. (Amsterdam, 1770).

Scholars now understand with more clarity that the American debate over slavery in the early republic was strongly affected by the Haitian slave rebellion, which erupted in 1791 and led to the first black republic in the world, as well as to the purchase of the Louisiana territory. The Library holds one of the world’s great collections relating to Haiti and its emergence as a free nation.

Raynal’s history of the New World was written in collaboration with various authors and banned not long after its appearance for its thinly veiled radicalism. The French historian Jules Michelet called it “the bible of the Revolution.” It has long been alleged, although not proven, that the Haitian Revolution owed its conception to the fact that Toussaint Louverture read the impassioned passage of the book that called for the destruction of slavery. When the Revolution began in 1791, it unleashed a racial conflict with enormous long-term consequences for Haiti and the United States. The war did not end until 1804, leaving many thousands dead, and the new Haitian republic a pariah republic, but nevertheless free and independent. Near the end of the war, Napoleon sold the huge Louisiana Territory to President Thomas Jefferson, transforming the young republic. The sale also set the ground for the debates over slavery’s expansion that would roil the United States in the 19th century.

Jean-Louis Dubroca. Vida de J. J. Dessalines, gefe de los negros de Santo Domingo. (Mexico: Mariano de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1806).

Dubroca was hired by the Bonaparte regime to conduct a propaganda war against Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the slave revolt on Saint Domingue. This work is a similar vilification of Toussaint’s successor, Dessalines.

According to Madison Smartt Bell, “As the leader of the only successful slave revolution in recorded history, and as the founder of the only independent black state in the Western Hemisphere ever to be created by former slaves, François Dominique Toussaint Louverture can fairly be called the highest achieving African-American hero of all time. And yet, two hundred years after his death . . . he remains one of the least known and most poorly understood of those heroes.”

[Thomas Clarkson]. Résumé du témoignage donné devant un comité de la Chambre de Communes de la Grande-Bretagne et de l’Irlande, touchant la traite des nègres. (Geneva: Chez Magnet et Cherbuliez, 1814).

This pamphlet is a translated condensation of Clarkson’s two-volume History of the rise, progress, and accomplishment of the abolition of the African slave trade by the British Parliament (first published in 1808), addressed to the rulers and their representatives at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 to urge them to take steps against the slave trade. The image of slaves as cargo on shipboard was ubiquitous by this time, but the one shown here, detailing a slave woman giving birth, was lately rediscovered by a JCB Fellow.

Triumph of Freedom Over Negro Slavery; or, the Ever to be Remembered glorious First of August, 1834. ([London]: Hunt (late Quick), [1834]).

Long after the close of the eighteenth century, the international alliance of anti-slavery activists achieved an enormous victory when the British parliament abolished slavery on August 1, 1834. The act was a testament to the efforts of generations of reformers from a wide variety of religious backgrounds, and to the growing power of the printed word to sway opinion. This vivid broadside celebrates not only the great act of 1834, but the life of one of the most tireless English campaigners against slavery, William Wilberforce (1759–1833), who died on the eve of emancipation. Wilberforce, active in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was deeply influential on the American anti-slavery community. English emancipation put enormous pressure on the slavery question in the United States, and is one of many reasons the debate became bitter in the 1830s. John Carter Brown’s vast collection of anti-slavery books and pamphlets is an indication of both his political sentiments and his bibliophilia.

William J. Brown. The Life of William J. Brown, of Providence, R.I. (Providence: Angell & Co., 1883).

Not all rare books come from the eighteenth century. This remarkable volume records the life story of William J. Brown, born in Providence November 10, 1814. His grandfather, Cudge Brown, “was born in Africa, and belonged to a firm (named Brown Brothers) consisting of four, named respectively, Joseph, John, Nicholas and Moses Brown;” he became a teamster working on the farms of Moses Brown. His grandson described Moses Brown as “highly esteemed by everyone,” in part because he allowed his slaves to marry. William Brown’s grandparents were married in 1768, five years before the crisis of conscience that led Moses Brown to emancipate all of his slaves. The book offers extraordinary information about African-American life in Rhode Island in the nineteenth century; it also contains valuable stories about Native American customs (Brown’s mother was a Narragansett).