Only a Miner : Studies in Recorded ...

This is the 1883 First Edition of "Hot Plowshare" by Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838 - 1905). Tourgée was one of the most active advocates for racial equality in the United States. He had fought, and been seriously wounded in the Civil War, while fighting for the Union. After the war he became a novelist, using his fiction to depict the history and conditions of black people under the rule of slavery. He was also a Radical Republican, a lawyer, politician, diplomat, and an early civil rights activist. As an active participant in Reconstruction, and having been appointed a Superior court Justice in North Carolina, he found himself confronting the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, who repeatedly made threats on his life. Tourgée, who had long worked for equal and political rights for all citizens and many other political and social things which are often only a dream still today, founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, established Bennett College, a women's school of predominately black enrollment, and worked as a lawyer on behalf of black clients in politically sensitive cases (Plessy vs Ferguson) coining the phrase "color-blind justice". Tourgée wrote a number of novels critical of slavery and championing abolition. /// "Hot Plowshares" has a tabloid-sounding title, but its content is very serious. On the book's front paste-down, which lists Tourgée's fictional works to date, "Hot Plowshares" is marked as "the latest". It is described, as I partially noted in this listing's title, as depicting, "The Rise and Growth of the Anti-Slavery Sentiment in Northern Politics". It was the last written in a series that each presented different stories about slavery and abolition, but as to its chronological place in the series, it was early. In his 1883 Preface to the novel Mr. Tourgée wrote : "The present volume is the last of the projected series. It is designed to give a review of the Anti-Slavery struggle, by tracing its growth and the influence of the sentiment upon contrasted characters. In the main, it does not concern itself with the promoters of this struggle. In no sense does the work profess to give a history of the movement, but only a truthful picture of the life upon which it acted, of the growth of its influence and its character as a preparation for the struggle in which those whose thought had been moulded by its sentiments were destined to engage. " The period covered by the now complete series of six volumes extends from twenty years before the war until twelve years after it. By the public, they have been persistently designated as 'historical novels' [which is exactly what the publishers call them]. The term is true only in that they have been endeavors to trace the operation of sentiments which have arisen from, and been instrumental in producing, historical facts. In chronological order they would stand as follows: ' Hot Plowshares', 'Figs and Thistles', 'A Royal Gentleman', 'A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools' (Tourgeé's most famous and popular novel], 'Bricks Without Straw', and 'John Eax'. When the series was begun the author had little hope that it would be completed. Now that it is finished, he is almost sorry to bid adieu to a subject that has engrossed the better part of his active manhood. It is believed that it constitutes the most serious attempt ever made to portray the various phases of a climacteric era, by successive pictures of the various forms of life developed thereby. (Philadelphia, May 2, 1883)" Thank you to Wikipedia for much of this. The Wikipedia article on Tourgée makes for fascinating reading. I highly recommend it. /// This is a nicely preserved copy of "Hot Plowshares", issued in the publisher's trade binding, which is yellow cloth with lettering in gilt on spine and black on the front cover. Spine and front cover each have decorative embellishment in black. The book is illustrated by six pictures drawn by the noted artist, A. B. Frost (of Brer Rabbit fame). His drawings were reprodu.  Bookseller Inventory # 8