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300 pp. (8vo) red cloth, decorated and lettered in gilt, all edges gilt. Second Edition. With some alterations and considerable additions.

Inscribed by the author’s daughter Susan to L.M.Benson, September 20, 1878, three years after the death of her father, a Philadelphia Judge. Original gilt-embossed cloth binding. When originally published in 1827, Stroud’s was the first comprehensive compilation of American laws on slavery. Nearly two decades later, this revised antebellum edition - 120 pages longer than the 1827 imprint - includes material on the slave’s complete lack of legal rights in twelve Southern states, on northern state laws which abolished slavery years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, on slaveholders’ attempts to muzzle the Abolitionists by “encroachments… on Freedom of Speech and the Press”, and on the Fugitive Slave laws just enacted in Washington. Stroud’s book (according to the publishers of a recent reprint) “had extensive influence upon national legal thinking on the issue of slavery” by exposing “the diabolical nature of legal enactments throughout the South that de based both African people and those who held them in bondage.”