Jamie Parker: The Fugitive.
Pierson, Mrs. Emily Catharine. Jamie Parker: the Fugitive. Hartford: Brockett, Fuller, and Co., 1851. .
Small 8vo.; contemporary ownership signature in pencil to front endpapers (“Helen Buffington”); foxed; brown cloth, stamped in gilt; edgewear; all edges gilt.
First edition of this abolitionist sketch of Slave life in the American South. Author Emily Catharine Pierson (1818-1900) wrote Jamie Parker a year after enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act. In it, she expresses her solidarity with the “life-and-death struggles of those now flying from a degrading servitude,” illustrating the horrors of slavery and the nobility of those who seek to escape. Blockson 7574.
The literary atmosphere of the mid-1800s was overwhelmed by a tide of abolitionist literature, which began to exert an enormous influence on Northern thought. Jamie Parker, along with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin the following year, were two of the more prominent abolitionist titles written by women. Pierson’s work was overshadowed by Beecher Stowe’s fame, despite the women writing from similar backgrounds (both as Congressionalist Connecticut white women writing on slavery). Jamie Parker would remain Pierson’s best-known title, despite a career elected to writing novels and journalism advancing the abolitionist cause (D'Azevedo, Warren. “Revolt on the San Dominick,” Phylon, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1956. p. 130).
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