Letter on Colonization, Addressed to the Rev. Thornton J. Mills, Corresponding Secretary of the Kentucky Colonization Society by Hon. James G. Birney, Late Vice-President of the Kentucky Colonization Society

First edition. 12mo. 46pp. Stitched printed self-wrappers. Inscribed in a contemporary hand on the front wrap: "Mr. M. F. Hait with the respects of J. H. Kimball." The top inch of the unprinted rear wrap torn away, small ink blot and small chip on the front wrap, bottom corners of the pages a little creased, still a nice and presentable at least very good copy. Birney was a successful lawyer, politician, and slaveholder in Kentucky and Alabama. He gradually came to believe that the problem of slavery could be solved by exporting slaves to a colony in Liberia. He worked for the American Abolition Society traveling throughout the South promoting the idea with only modest success. In this important pamphlet, published in the same year that he freed his remaining slaves, Birney expresses his renunciation of his long held belief in either the expulsion and forced colonization of the slaves or gradual emancipation, in favor of immediate abolition of slavery. Birney died in 1857 at the Raritan Bay Union utopian community in the company of fellow abolitionists and residents Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke. The presenter of this copy, J. H. Kimball, was also employed by the American Abolition Society, was an editor of the *New Hampshire Herald of Freedom*, and co-author with J. A. Thome, of *Six Months Tour in the West Indies 1837.* This text represents an important way-station in the evolution of the Abolitionist Movement. Uncommon in the trade, with a reasonably nice association.…