British novelist Charles Kingsley’s annotated copy of Fisher’s essays about the political consequences for slavery of the admission to the Union of Kansas and Nebraska as potentially free - that is non-slaveholding - states. Broadly in favour of abolition but attached to the Southern cause by ties of family and birth - Kingsley’s grandparents were themselves slave-owners in the Caribbean - Charles Kingsley’s annotations to this book, made during the second year of the American Civil War, see him tread a fine and sometimes confused line as he wrestles with the contrary arguments raging around slaveholding and abolition.
The book’s writer Sidney Fisher was a Philadelphia lawyer, plantation owner and previous apologist for slavery who moved over to the abolitionist cause in the course of writing this text, noting: ‘It would be far better in all respects for the South to emancipate the laves at once’. However traces of Fisher’s former position remain in the text, giving succour to Kingsley’s more illiberal instincts.
Kingsley begins his jottings in the Preface where Fisher’s printed mention of the ‘question of emancipation’ is altered by Kingsley to ‘experiment of emancipation’. In Fisher’s discussion of the south’s ‘politicians [who] are forced to invoke the authority of Congress over slavery’ Kingsley adds a marginal note: ‘No - a later assertion that Congress has to execute the Constitution & that Slavery is in it’ (p36). Kingsley adds to Fisher’s comment that ‘All have an equal right to go to the Territories, to vote when there for or against slavery...’ by underlining the last three words and writing in the margin: ‘? being a question of private respect.’ He adds one of his longest notes about Henry Clay’s resolution of 1850 against introducing slavery in California: ‘So Congress abrogated their power w[hich] the author ascribes to it, leaving by their own words, slaveholders to introduce slaves’ (p68). At the end of the first essay Kingsley signs off with a long postscript: ‘And this is the consequence - C Kingsley Nov 21. 1862. Oh miserable attempt to reconsider with conscience, the plain fact that a slave is, by the Constitution Property. So much the worse for the Constitution.’
Although he made pro-Southern remarks in speeches given during the Civil War, Kingsley published almost nothing on the subject of slavery, adding to the significance of these insights into his private dialogue over abolition and the southern cause.
DESCRIPTION: Small octavo bound in publisher’s straight grain brown cloth with blind-stamped decorations; a little rubbing only to extremities. Brown coated endpapers, the first of which has lost a thin sliver along the top edge where it has become adhered to the next leaf. The book’s provenance has been carefully recorded by Kingsley’s daughter Rose Georgina Kingsley opposite the title page where she writes: ‘All the marks & ink notes in this book are in Charles Kingsley’s hand writing in 1862. Rose Kingsley May 2.1906 see p.86’ Opposite her presentation inscription is her gift inscription to the British historian ‘Hugh Egerton from R G K. May 2. 1906’ - Egerton was a family friend of Kingsley’s daughters, notably Mary St Leger Kingsley who wrote under the pseudonym Lucas Malet. Contained within a drop-back solander box, half crushed brown morocco over marbled sides. Kingsley writes in a mixture of pencil and ink; there are 15 annotations in all, the longest running to 5 lines inserted at the end of a chapter. The annotations are confined to Fisher’s Preface and his first essay, ‘The Territories and the Constitution’ that deals with the slavery question most immediately. Kingsley has dog-earred the book extensively during his reading of it.
He also makes occasional stylistic corrections and repeatedly highlights sections of the text concerning slavery, showing particular interest in the extension of measures relating to the recapture of fugitive slaves to the new territories.
CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875) was a novelist, clergyman and controversialist. He wrote a series of celebrated historical novels and most famously The Water Babies, he became Chaplain to Queen Victoria and welcomed the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species.
