First Abolition Publications

Elihu Embree did not begin as an abolitionist. The son of a Quaker minister who moved from Pennsylvania in 1790, he and his brother Elijah were among the region's first ironmakers, and as a young man he owned slaves and called himself a deist. Around thirty he turned, joined the Manumission Society of Tennessee, organized in Greene County in 1815, and wrote antislavery petitions. His monthly Emancipator, first dated April 30, 1820, called slaveholders monsters in human flesh. He died that same year of bilious fever.

What the plaque says

First Abolition Publications On this site, in 1819-1820, were published The Manumission Intelligencer and The Emancipator. Edited and published by Elihu Embree and printed by Jacob Howard, these were the first periodicals in the United States devoted exclusively to abolition of human slavery.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jonesborough Historic District — 0.4 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
• Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 10 mi
  A museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 11 mi
  William Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.
• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 13 mi
  A shoal on the Watauga River where the Transylvania Company bought about 20 million acres from the Cherokee in March 1775, Dragging Canoe refused, and the Overmountain Men mustered in 1780.

More markers nearby

• Christopher Taylor House — steps away
• Alfred Martin Ray, Buffalo Soldier — steps away
• Chester Inn — steps away
• Alfred Eugene Jackson — steps away