CHARLESTON COURIER, South Carolina, March 14, 1803  

* Very rare & early Southern antebellum publication

A volume I issue of this famous title from the South.
The back page has ads headed: "Prime Negroes for Sale" with much detail, and another: "For Sale, 40 Valuable Negro Slaves".
Four pages, slightly irregular at the blank spine due to disbinding, nice condition.

Background: This March 14, 1803 issue of the Charleston Courier represents a highly scarce and historically significant artifact from the first volume of one of the antebellum South’s most influential newspapers. Published just two months after the paper's founding, this four-page edition offers a stark, primary-source window into the institutionalization of human bondage in a premier American port city. The prominent back-page advertisements—specifically detailing the sale of "Prime Negroes" and "40 Valuable Negro Slaves"—are profoundly significant; they capture South Carolina's economy during a critical transitional window just months before the state legislature voted to reopen the African slave trade in late 1803, and just five years before the federal ban took effect in 1808. Because newspapers from the opening months of the Courier were printed in limited runs on fragile rag paper and rarely survived the Civil War, extant copies from Volume I are exceptionally rare, making this issue an invaluable and sobering cultural touchstone for historians studying the mechanics of the domestic slave trade.