[Ambrose Serle]. The Happy Negro. To which Are Added, The Praying Soldier. And the Profligate Reclaimed. New York: The American Tract Society, circa 1825.

8vo, 4 1/4 x 8 3/4 in., 12 pages (inclusive of wrappers which include 3 additional text pages). Wood engraving to title page. Original scarce wrappers. 

RARE. OCLC records approximately 9 examples. 

Ambrose Serle was a British naval official, administrator, and devout Calvinist writer with a profound, if adversarial, interest in the Thirteen Colonies. A staunch imperialist, Serle viewed the American revolutionaries as ungrateful subjects who had willfully rejected the liberties and protections of the British Empire. Serle first traveled to America in 1774 while serving as undersecretary to William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the Colonies. He returned in 1776 as the "Clerk of Reports" and private secretary to Admiral Lord Richard Howe. Recognizing Serle’s talent as a writer and his theological conviction that the British Empire was a divinely ordained authority, New York Royal Governor William Tryon tasked him with establishing a Loyalist press to counter rebel propaganda. On September 30, 1776, Serle took control of The New York Gazette, a previously nonpartisan newspaper published by "Turncoat Editor" Hugh Gaine, turning it into a powerful mouthpiece for the Crown.

During this time, Serle visited a local farm in New York where he engaged in a profound religious conversation with an enslaved man. Moved by the man's evangelical piety, Serle penned The Happy Negro, a tract detailing their dialogue on faith, submission, and the Bible. Decades after the war, the text was adopted and widely circulated by the American Tract Society, founded in 1825, as part of their massive colportage movement to distribute Christian literature across the expanding United States. The wood engraving illustrating the wrapper and title page was likely created by Alexander Anderson (1775-1870), an American physician and illustrator.

In the text, Serle is surprised by his new acquaintance's literacy and familiarity with the Bible, given his enslavement, and asks, "how he got comfort under all this trial. 'O massa,' said he, ''it was Christ gave me comfort by his dear word. He bade me come unto him and he would give me rest, for I was very weary and heavy laden...I was delighted with the sweet spirit...of his answers, with the heavenly wisdom the God had put into the mind of this negro." Though published well after the Revolutionary war, Serle's account still offers a powerful moral rebuke to the American revolutionaries who rebelled against the divinely sanctioned authority of the British Empire, rather than accepting one's ordained station with humility, the ultimate Christian virtue exemplified by the enslaved man. The communion he feels with this man, whose circumstances differ so vastly from his own, reaffirm his own faith, and he writes assertively, "Happy world, if all were Christians; or at least, happy Christians, if they showed more of this brotherly love to each other in the world." Overall, by highlighting a man who found true liberty in spiritual servitude rather than political revolt, Serle’s tract subtly reinforced the hierarchical worldviews of both his Calvinist faith and his devotion to the British Crown.

[American Revolutionary War, American Revolution, Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, Colonial America, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe] [Colonial America, 13 Colonies, Thirteen Colonies] [Ephemera, Pamphlets, Publications, Booklets]

Wrappers soiled, repair to front wrapper verso. Chips at margins.