An excellent copy of Mifflin Gibbs’ autobiography, rich with detail on his life as newspaper publisher, lawyer, politician, diplomat and goldrush pioneer. The work includes accounts of his tour with Frederick Douglass in 1849, his trip west to gold fields in 1850, civil rights protests, local elections, a real distillation of life in mid-nineteenth century America. Importantly, this copy bears a full page (unsigned) inscription from Gibbs to William Knowles Cooper (1867-1932), longtime general secretary of the YMCA in DC, and a promotional broadside advertising the work.
Free-born in Philadelphia in 1823, Gibbs was active in the Underground Railroad, working with the legendary conductor William Grant Still. This brought him to the attention of Frederick Douglass whom he accompanied on his tour of New York in 1849. On this tour, “Gibbs learned that gold had been discovered in California, and he set out to find his fortune. Reaching San Francisco in 1850, he decided that more money could be made in business than in panning for gold. Consequently, along with a black partner, Peter Lester, Gibbs established a clothing and dry goods store, Lester & Gibbs. His business prospered, and he quickly became a well-known and successful entrepreneur” (ANB). He bought, and acted as editor of, The Mirror of the Times which was the first Black newspaper west of the Mississippi, and continued his interest in abolition.
The passing of discriminatory laws in California compelled him, and several hundred others, to head north to British Columbia in 1858 to join the frontier community. Gibbs not only became a Canadian citizen but also the first elected Black official in BC in 1866. He returned to the US a couple of years later when he studied for a law degree at Oberlin College and established a practice in Little Rock, AK. By 1873, he was elected a judge, becoming the first Black man in the US to do so. He held this position for two years, and was made register of the US Land Office for Little Rock, where he remained for twelve. Gibbs served as US consul to Tamatave, Madagascar from 1898-1901 and very proudly styles himself as “late consul to Madagascar” on both the upper cover and the title-page. Such was his stature that the work concludes with a description of his visit to Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.
Illustrated throughout with portraits of illustrious African Americans and noted abolitionists, Shadow and Light covers his life until this point and Gibbs writes about the Amistad captives, Nat Turner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lucretia Mott. The introduction by Booker T. Washington further confirms Shadow and Light as an important work by one of the most vital Black figures in the second half of nineteenth-century America.
Blockson, 3987; Howes, G35 “aa”; not in Cowan.
