An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes: followed with an account of the life and works of fifteen negroes & mulattoes, distinguished in science, literature and the arts
Authors of source text
Contributions
- David Baillie Warden
- translator
- Thomas Kirk
- publisher
Related resources
- is translation of
- De la littérature des Nègres, ou, Recherches sur leurs facultés intellectuelles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature : suivies de notices sur la vie et les ouvrages des Nègres qui se sont distingués dans les sciences, les lettres et les arts has translation
- has paratext
- An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes: followed with an account of the life and works of fifteen negroes & mulattoes, distinguished in science, literature and the arts paratext
Notes
The translation of Grégoire's book became an immediate rallying point for the nascent abolitionist cause in America. As the long listing of dedicatees (many of whom were still living when the book went to press) shows, the English abolitionist movement was considerably larger and more established than its counterpart in America at this time. Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807 and the US follows suit in 1808.
Its examples of African-American achievement, especially the biographical listings in Chapter VII, with their accounts of the lives of Toussaint Louverture, Ogé, Equiano, Ignatius Sancho & Phyllis Wheatley, remained the standard source for abolitionist writings throughout the nineteenth century.
See David Wilson, 'United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic' (1998, Cornell University Press).