The American Anti-Slavery Almanac, for 1837

The second yearly American Anti-Slavery Almanac, combining abolitionist activism with a practical yearly farmer's almanac. Collated and complete with 48pp., binding recently resewn, loss to bottom corner of front cover without effecting text, and thinning to paper along bottom margin, likely from the erasure of a previous ownership inscription.

This particular edition was published both in Boston and Cincinnati, and is most notable for its three engravings, including "A Mother's Anguish", depicting an African American woman holding an axe above her sleeping children, preparing to murder them in order to save them from a life of enslavement, with a sympathetic, explanatory dialogue below. This is one of the earliest visual depictions of infanticide in abolitionist literature, likely deriving from the well-publicized case of Annice, an enslaved woman who was executed in Missouri in 1828 for the death of her children, decades before the more famous case of Margaret Garner, whose story inspired Toni Morrison's Beloved.