1795 JOHN NEWTON. First American Edition of John Newton's Anti-Slavery Autobiography

This 1795 Philadelphia imprint of John Newton’s Letters, which includes his famous autobiographical Authentic Narrative. Written after his dramatic conversion, the included Authentic Narrative chronicles Newton’s terrifying descent into the Middle Passage, his time enslaved himself under a slave trader’s wife on the West African coast, and his eventual rise to captaining slave ships before renouncing the trade and becoming a minister and abolitionist himself.

As the first American edition of these core writings, published by William Young in 1795, the book arrived in the United States during a intense period of post-Revolutionary debate over the moral legitimacy of human bondage. Newton had become one of Britain's most prominent anti-slavery voices and a key mentor to William Wilberforce, authoring his scathing eyewitness exposé Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade in 1788. The American publication of his personal testimony and letters provided Northern abolitionist groups and religious reformers with an authoritative, firsthand account of the brutal reality of the Atlantic slave trade from a man who had participated in it directly. By bringing Newton's narrative of sin, redemption, and the horrors of the slave trade to an American readership, this 1795 volume served as a potent evangelical tool used to awaken the public conscience against the institution of slavery in the young United States.

Offered at auction but once in the last 100 years, and that a disbound example. 

Newton, John. Letters, Originally Published under the Signatures of Omicron and Vigil. By the Rev. Mr. John Newton, Minister of the Gospel in London, to which is Prefixed, an Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of Mr. Newton. Communicated in a Series of Letters to the Rev. Mr. Haweis, Record of Aldwinckle, Northamptonshire. Philadelphia. Printed by William Young. 1795. First American Edition. 372pp. 

A rather nicely preserved example in original plain calf binding. Rubbed at extremities with some minor chipping as shown. 19th century Whitton family provenance.