Der Bekehrte Neger. Eine wahre Geschichte mitgetheit von L. Richmond

New York: Amerikanischen Traktat-Gesellschaft, 1850. Very good plus.. 64pp. In German. 16mo. Original dark green limp cloth. Light wear and soiling. Small marbled-paper bookplate on inside front cover, pencil ownership signature on front flyleaf from "Ellen S. Kem." A pocket-sized edition of Legh Richmond's The African Servant, printed in German by the American Tract Society. The work purports to tbe an authentic narrative of the Christian conversion of a free Black man named William, whom Richmond met while serving as a priest on the Isle of Wight, but the work is troubling to modern sensibilities. The work attempts to shift the focus from William's (truncated) experiences as a slave to his conversion process. When William travels to the United States, his experiences there make him thankful for his time as a slave and makes him "regard his home in Africa as a place of spiritual darkness." According to the entry on Legh Richmond on Documenting the American South: "In The Negro Servant, Richmond presents William's conversion as proof that God will one day convert the inhabitants of Africa to Christianity. Richmond believes that the enslavement of Africans is a fulfillment of the biblical curse 'originally pronounced on the descendants of Ham.' It states that 'A servant of servants shall he be.' Richmond nonetheless 'calls aloud for the ardent prayers and active exertions of Christians in their behalf' and anticipates that before the second coming of Christ, 'the poor benighted Negro will look down from the ends of the earth unto Jesus and be saved.' He offers William as proof that 'though some men are white and some are black, true Christianity is all of one colour.'"

The present edition appears to be a mid-19th century edition of the work, which the ATS first published in 1827. The present work was published after the ATS moved from 144 Nassau Street to 150 Nassau, which is the address here. Other than the first edition, OCLC records a German-language edition of the The African Servant published with two other works in the 1850s. However, we were not able to locate a record matching the present work in OCLC - a separately-published, 64pp. German-language edition of the work. (Inventory #: 4346)