Heading: (African American, 1861)
Author: Durbin, John Price
Title: Our Missionary Picture
Place Published:
Publisher:Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church
Date Published: 1861
Description: 18 pp. 6¾x4¼", self-wrappers. First Edition. A rare imprint, with only one institutional copy located in the U.S. Written early in the Civil War by the prominent Secretary of the Methodist Missionary Society, previously Chaplain of the US Senate and President of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, was a frank explanation of how the first Methodist missions to Africa evolved from the Colonization movement to send emancipated Blacks to Africa, long denounced by radical Abolitionists as a scheme to detract from ending slavery in America. Buried in Durbin's account of Methodist missionaries in China, India, South and North America was this statement of the racist basis for Colonization: "Our mission in Africa arose some thirty years ago, thus: Henry Clay of Kentucky, and some leading citizens who agreed with him, saw, or thought they saw, two races of people in this land so dissimilar that they could not intermarry and be cordially accepted on each side. They concluded that these two races never could dwell together on terms of equality and they therefore inferred that either they must be peacefully separated or come into dire conflict in process of years...They advised peaceable separation, and to accomplish it, originated the American Colonization Society... to show the world that the African race was capable of self-government under favorable circumstances, and thus induce the people of this land to favor their removal to Africa, and leave North America to the white race..."

Moderate foxing; good to very good.