Duplicate Copy of the Souvenir from the Afro-American League of Tennessee to Hon. James M. Ashley of Ohio.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Publishing House of the A.M.E. Church, 1894. 4to, illustrated boards, 851, [48]pp. With fourteen plates and various tables. Hinges starting, text block fine, very good condition overall. Item #List3824 A substantial memorial volume prepared by the Afro-American League of Tennessee in honor of James Mitchell Ashley of Ohio, edited by Benjamin W. Arnett, bishop of the A.M.E. Church, with an introduction by Frederick Douglass. Ashley served in Congress from 1859 to 1869, chaired the Committee on Territories, and became one of the leading Radical Republican advocates for constitutional abolition. In December 1863 he introduced a proposal in the House for an amendment abolishing slavery throughout the United States, a measure that became part of the legislative history of the Thirteenth Amendment. After Congress, Ashley served briefly as governor of Montana Territory and later became president of the Toledo, Ann Arbor & Northern Railroad. The book originated in a presentation made to Ashley on Emancipation Day, September 22, 1893, at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. With Ashley’s consent, the souvenir was then issued in this published “duplicate” form, with an appendix recording the presentation ceremonies. WorldCat summarizes the publication history in the same terms: Ashley’s speeches were first compiled and presented to him as a souvenir, then published with an appendix as this volume. The appendix includes the addresses delivered at the Chicago presentation, among them remarks by William H. Young, president of the Afro-American League of Tennessee, and Bishop Arnett, whose address reviewed African American progress since Emancipation. The contents gather Ashley’s speeches from the antislavery and Reconstruction era through his later political reform addresses, including material on slavery, emancipation, constitutional amendment, Reconstruction, suffrage, and direct election of federal officers. The volume also has added interest as an African-American commemorative publication: it was assembled and issued under the auspices of the Afro-American League of Tennessee, edited by a major A.M.E. bishop and Black Ohio legislator, and introduced by Douglass near the end of his life. Arnett himself was a prominent A.M.E. cleric and represented Greene County in the Ohio House of Representatives from 1885 to 1887, where he argued for repeal of Ohio’s segregation laws. A major African American tribute volume to one of the white Radical Republicans most closely associated with the constitutional destruction of slavery.
Price: $1,250.00