Various authors. Fast Day Sermons: Or, The Pulpit on the States of the Country. New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1861. 

12mo, 336pp. Original brown cloth, spine gilt-lettered. FIRST EDITION. LCP, Afro-Americana 3617; Sabin 23907

A rare collection of pro-slavery sermons issued in New York at the onset of the Civil War.

The sermons were delivered by a veritable "who's who" of Confederate preachers of the era, many of them Presbyterians. Authors include Confederate chaplain Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898), slaveowner James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862), Benjamin Morgan Palmer (1818-1902), Robert J. Breckinridge (1800-1871, son of Kentucky Senator John Breckinridge), and the notorious anti-abolitionist Henry Jackson Van Dyke, Sr. (1822-1891). 

Also included, almost certainly in a misguided attempt to provide legitimacy to the publication, is a sermon by abolitionist and social reformer Henry Ward Beecher (1812-1887) entitled "Peace be Still." Preached just two weeks after South Carolina's Articles of Secession, he urged calm and peace. It seems all but impossible that Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother, consented to have his sermon used as a lever to forestall action against slavery or to be seen in the company of anti-abolitionists. 

VERY RARE. No copy has sold at auction since 1913. 

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