1852 VANITY PRESS. Monthly Biographical Magazine Including Important Confederates Politicians, &c.

A very nicely preserved assemblage of John Livingston’s Monthly Biographical Magazine, a classic nineteenth-century vanity press or subscription biographical dictionary. Livingston charged prominent regional elites, such as lawyers, politicians, bankers, and judges, a fee or required them to purchase subscriptions in exchange for featuring their portrait and a flattering memoir in the work. While explicitly designed to praise living figures of the era, volumes like this hold significant value for historians today because they capture primary-source biographies, regional politics, and steel-engraved portraits of early-to-mid nineteenth-century American figures, many of whom are otherwise difficult to research, or from periods in their lives before they became more prominent.

During this era, such presses often featured a disproportionate amount of Southern leaders, Plantation owners, etc., attempting to rehabilitate their reputation from the assaults of abolitionist publications, etc. 

Several of the figures included in this volume played major roles in early American settlement, the political debates surrounding slavery, and the lead-up to the American Civil War.

James L. Orr of South Carolina served in the U.S. House of Representatives, later becoming Speaker of the House from 1857 to 1859, and went on to serve as a Confederate Senator during the Civil War and Governor of South Carolina during Reconstruction. As a leading pro-slavery Southern Democrat, Orr signed South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession and raised Orr's Rifles for the Confederate Army.

Aaron V. Brown of Tennessee served as the eleventh Governor of Tennessee, later became U.S. Postmaster General under President James Buchanan, and was a delegate to the famous 1850 Nashville Convention, where Southern states gathered to discuss collective action and potential secession regarding federal slavery restriction laws.

Jacob Burnet of Ohio was an early U.S. Senator, Associate Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, author of Notes on the Early Settlement of the North-Western Territory, and a primary founding figure who helped draft early territorial laws and champion the National Land Act of 1820.

Reuben H. Walworth was the last Chancellor of New York and a conservative Democrat who actively attempted to broker peace between Northern and Southern factions in the decade leading up to the Civil War.

Livingston, John [ed.] The Monthly Biographical Magazine. New York. 1852. 178pp.

Very handsome half leather with finely executed full page illustrations throughout. One loose. Else very solid and clean. Please note this item contains the biographies of the figures in the Contents image that have been bracketed, i.e. Burnett through Orr.