The Rejected Stone; Or, Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America

Boston: Walker, Wise, and Co., 1862. 2nd edition. First published in 1861. An impassioned plea for the abolition of slavery by "a Native of Virginia" [Moncure D. Conway, American clergyman and abolitionist, originally from an old slaveholding family.] This edition published shortly after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and with the worst of the Civil War still ahead. 131 pp. Clothbound hardcover. Good overall. Intact and securely bound, but the textured cloth is worn, faded, creased and spotted. Colored foxing/stains to the endpapers, title and early pages. Text pages generally clean otherwise. A presentable copy in a new, clear archival jacket (not pictured.) Provenance: Inscription in pencil on the first blank page from George O. [Otis] Shattuck to Henry G. [Gardner] Denny. Both were Boston lawyers and abolitionists. Shattuck (1829-1897) was a legal mentor to a young Oliver Wendell Holmes, a future Supreme Court justice. They were later legal partners, and Holmes wrote a memoir of Shattuck in 1900. Denny, along with his work as a lawyer, was a noted book collector whose library included four First Folios of Shakespeare. He and Shattuck had been classmates at Harvard.