Description:

"THE DYING NEGRO" - THE FIRST LITERARY ATTACK ON SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE
An important printing in an American news magazine, the text of British poet Thomas Day and Thomas Bicknell''s poem "The Dying Negro". This poem was the earliest direct literary attack on slavery and the slave trade, and can be seen, in part, as a response to the lukewarm enforcement of the famous Mansfield decision of the previous year. Lord Mansfield, in a case brought by the abolitionist Granville Sharp, had ruled that no slave could be compelled to leave the country against his or her own will - precisely the fate awaiting the slave who inspired the poem. The poem appears in "The Pennsylvania Magazine", Philadelphia, January, 1776, 52pp. 4 3/4" x 7 1/2", published by Robert Aitken (who also published the first English bible in the U.S.). The work imagined a man''s final thoughts for his wife before he died, and his pleas to be remembered. But the story was true – Day and Bicknell had read it in a London newspaper in May 1773. An African slave had escaped from his master, Captain Ordington''s house, in the hope that he could marry one of the household''s servants and secure his freedom. Before the ceremony could be performed he was captured and placed on board Ordington''s ship in the Thames. Here, he shot himself in the head, rather than return to the slave plantations. Day himself was a close friend of Benjamin Franklin, and was also an ardent abolitionist.

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April 7, 2017 2:00 PM EDT
Brooklyn, NY, US

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