An Abstract of the Evidence delivered before a Select Committee.

£4,250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Important abstract of the evidence presented to the select committee of the House of Commons with testimony by many of the leading champions of the abolitionist cause. The work also includes an engraving of three horizontal and four vertical views of the slave-holding decks of the slave ship Brookes with a cargo of 482 closely packed bodies. “The parliamentary hearings, which had dragged on intermittently for nearly two years, ended in early 1791. The abolitionists then faced a curious problem. There were nearly 1,700 pages of House of Commons testimony, on top of the hefty 850 page volume from the Privy Council hearings of several years earlier, filled with eyewitness accounts, tables, and excerpts from slave laws of different colonies, some of them in French. No one could expect even the most sympathetic M.P. to master this mountain of material. And so, in the weeks before the next debate on the slave trade began, a group of abolitionists embarked on a feverish collective editing marathon - Wilberforce even working on Sundays, so urgent did he feel the task - to distill some three years of testimony into an account short enough to be given to each M.P. to read. The committee then sent it to all of them” (Hochschild) The preface to the Abstract states the purpose of this work and outlines the historical context for it: “In consequence of the numerous petitions which were sent to parliament from different Counties, Cities, and Towns in Great Britain, in the year 1788, for the

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