339 pp. Woodcut frontispiece. 7¼x5", original brown cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Early Edition.
Virulently racist treatise first published at the dawn of the civil war. John H. Van Evrie (1814–1896) was an American physician and defender of slavery, the author of several books on race and slavery which expounded the ideas of scientific racism for a popular audience. Van Evrie has been described as "perhaps the first professional racist in American history."