Memoir of James Jackson.
[Abolition] Paul, Susan. Memoir of James Jackson. The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Age Six Years and Eleven Months. Boston: James Loring, 1835.
12mo.; lacking pages 83-86 (unattributed poem, “The Little Blind Boy”); endpapers and text pages soiled and foxed; brown paper-covered boards, brown leather spine; paper spine label; extremities, including spine label, rubbed; pin holes in upper joint.
First edition of the earliest abolitionist biography by a black woman; one of six known copies, including those at AAS, Oberlin, Library Company of Philadelphia, General Theological Seminary of Protestant Episcopal Church, and Columbia University. The anonymously published poem absent from this copy was not part of Paul’s text as it first appeared in Garrison’s abolition newspaper, The Liberator. Despite the flaws noted above, this is a sound copy of a rare book; not in Dumond or other standard African-American sources.
Susan Paul (1827-1833), African-American abolitionist, writer, teacher, and founder of the Juvenile Choir, was, with Maria Stewart (Productions, 1835) and Jarena Lee (Life and Experiences, 1836), one of the first African American women to write compellingly about her race. This volume predates the Grimké sisters’ Letters to Catharine Beecher and Letters on the Equality of the Sexes by three years. Scholar Lois Brown rediscovered Paul’s work and revived her reputation with a new edition of Memoir Of James Jackson in 2000.
Paul was the daughter of Thomas Paul, pastor of the African Church, known as the Belknap Street Church, home to the first African American primary school in Boston. Her uncles Nathaniel and Benjamin Paul were also Baptist ministers and were actively involved in early efforts to abolish slavery and advance the life of African Americans. Her father presided at the wedding of Maria Stewart, African American feminist speaker, who, in 1831, just 4 years prior to the publication of this book, called for the African American sisters to “distinguish yourselves. Show forth to the world that you are endowed with noble and exalted faculties.”
This Susan Paul most certainly did. In 1832 she formed the Juvenile Choir, made up of her African-American primary students, and took the group for special appearances at various anti-slavery meetings throughout New England. In 1833, she was elected secretary of the African American Ladies’ Temperance Society. In 1834, one year prior to publication of James Jackson, Paul was one of the first African-American women invited to join the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and was appointed to the office of counselor. She attended the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women as one of two Boston delegates in 1837 and in 1838 was elected vice president of the second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women held in Philadelphia. In 1840 she was, with Lydia Maria Child, one of two BFASS delegates to the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. After her older sister’s premature death, she cared for her four young children from 1834 until her own premature death. Paul died of consumption in 1841 – one year prior to Frederick Douglass’ first antislavery speech.
In Memoir of James Jackson, advertised for sale, along with works by Phillis Wheatley and Lydia Maria Child in the Boston book shop of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Paul makes a strong case against racism, pointing out that the “free” African Americans living in the North suffered from white racist persecution. Taking a stand that would be adopted in later works by African American women (notably Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Our Nig, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), Paul makes her case by depicting a highly intelligent and sensitive child whose innocence is sullied and life is ruined when he learns of the existence of slavery. In daring such a powerful indictment of not just slavery but of the racial prejudice pervasive even in
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