William Harper. Memoir on Slavery.  Charleston, South Carolina: James S. Burges, 1838. 

8vo, 61 pages. With tipped in Errata. Original wrappers. FIRST EDITION. Dumond 4595; Howes H-213; Sabin 30418.

A very scarce and historically pivotal work by one of the most radical pro-slavery thinkers of the early 19th century. Exceptionally scarce in the trade.

William Joseph Harper (1790-1847) was one of the most significant voices in the pro-slavery, soon-to-be Confederacy, Southern United States of the 1830s. A prominent lawyer in Columbia, South Carolina, Governor Richard Manning appointed Harper to fill the U.S. Senate seat that had become vacant with the death of John Gaillard. Harper served from 28 March 1826 until 7 December, when the South Carolina legislature elected William Smith, then served again from 1835 until his death in 1847.

Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, Harper was an active defender of South Carolina, free trade, and state rights. He prominently supported the nullification movement led by John C. Calhoun and argued in a series of court opinions that states in the Union were sovereign political entities, each possessing the right to reject federal laws it found unconstitutional.

Harper is most infamously remembered as an early and important representative of pro-slavery thought. The work offered here, first given as a lecture in 1838 and reprinted in the Southern Literary Journal, classed Harper as a leading proponent of the notion that slavery was not merely a necessary evil, but a positive social good.

Harper advanced several philosophical, racial, and economic arguments on behalf of slavery, but his central idea was that "slavery anticipates the benefits of civilization, and retards the evils of civilization." The slaveholding South, he contended, had achieved a social balance that allowed for steady economic and technological progress while avoiding the chaos of urban and industrial society. Harper employed an assessment of other nations to bolster his point of view, averring that non-slaveholding civilizations in northern climates, such as Great Britain, were riven by inequality, political radicalism, and other dangers. Non-slaveholding civilizations in more southerly areas, meanwhile, such as Spain, Italy, and Mexico, were rapidly slipping into "degeneracy and barbarism." Only the slaveholding Southern United States, Brazil, and Cuba could be seen making "favorable progress."

A significant work of the antebellum debate on slavery. 

VERY RARE. Only two copies have sold at auction, most recently in 1948.

[African Americana, African American History, Black History, Slavery, Enslavement, Abolition, Emancipation] [Pamphlets, Publications, Ephemera, Books, Rare Books, Tracts]

Soiled, wear to edges.