1862 CIVIL WAR A RESURRECTION. Radical Abolitionist Work Gifted by Samuel May of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society

A superbly provenanced copy of Moncure Daniel Conway’s The Rejected Stone; Or, Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America, one of the most radical, uncompromising abolitionist tracts of the American Civil War.

Written anonymously by Conway, a native Virginian who broke with his Southern heritage to become a fierce abolitionist minister and associate of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Lloyd Garrison, the work passionately argued that the Civil War could not be successfully resolved through a mere political restoration of the Union. He demanded, instead, a moral and spiritual revolution centered on the immediate, total abolition of slavery. By framing emancipation as a divine necessity and a sacred national resurrection, Conway challenged the Lincoln administration’s early conservative war aims and helped shift Northern public opinion toward embracing total emancipation as the true moral test of the conflict.

And this is a special copy indeed, linking together Samuel May, Rev. Bartholomew Van Dame, and William W. Pendergast; an exceptional association artifact of the New England anti-slavery movement.

Samuel May, i.e. Samuel Joseph May Jr., stationed at the Anti-Slavery Office in Boston, served as organizational head for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and a close ally of Garrison. A core part of his work was the organization of effective distribution of the Society's abolitionist literature. Gifting this volume directly from the Boston Anti-Slavery Office to abolitionist minister, Rev. Bartholomew Van Dame, demonstrates the active, personal dissemination of revolutionary anti-slavery thought among reform-minded clergy during the darkest years of the war. The subsequent descent of the volume into the hands of William W. Pendergast, a prominent Minnesota educator, Civil War-era figure, and later state legislator, traces the national spread of abolitionist sentiment and memorialization as New England reform ideology migrated westward into the post-war American Midwest. 

Conway, Moncure Daniel. The Rejected Stone; Or, Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America. By a Native of Virginia. Second Edition. Boston. Walker, Wise, and Company. 1862. 131pp.

Good - in original cloth; cloth dampstained and rubbed as shown. Very slightly shaken at prelims and a bit toned. Else good, crisp and clean.