Heading: (Anti-Slavery - Cuba)
Author: Taylor, John Glanville
Title: United States and Cuba, Eight Years of Change and Travel
Place Published: London
Publisher:Bentley
Date Published: 1851
Description: 328 pp. Original cloth, gilt title on spine. First Edition.Scarce memoir of an adventurous young Englishman's travels in America and Cuba travels.During the worldwide Depression of the 1840s, Taylor sailed for America as a teenager, traveling from Philadelphia to Virginia and Washington, DC, where met President Tyler at the White House. He offers his impressions of America, predicting that the Southern states would soon voluntarily liberate their slaves, who, he thought, ought to be sent to freedom in Liberia. Failing to find any profitable mining enterprise in the U.S. and hearing rumors of a gold discovery in Cuba, he sailed to the island, but when the gold allure fizzled, became overseer on sugar plantation. Taylor approved of freeing the Cuban slaves, especially after a ruinous famine gave rise to a "Negro conspiracy" to foment a slave uprising. Speaking too freely of his sympathy for the enslaved, he was briefly arrested on a flimsy charge of plotting against the Cuban Government. Freed by influential friends, after four unpromising years abroad, he returned to England, but later took off again, this time for Ceylon, where he wrote this book and died before its publication, at age 29.

Binding bit shaken, tape repair to lower spine, lower corners bent; some foxing, rear hinge starting; good.