Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies - Paperback

by John W. Blassingame (Editor)

"A magisterial and landmark work, one that merits wide and thoughtful readership not only by historians, but, more important, by those of us who count on historians to tell us truly about our past."--New York Times

"A testament to the resilience of the black spirit, faced with a primitive and largely conscienceless regime."--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, South Atlantic Quarterly

"This volume does much more than merely present a rich collection of judiciously selected and skillfully edited sources of the history of slavery; in the process it reveals a host of large-as-life slaves and ex-slaves: Kale, the precocious eleven-year-old Mende of the Amistad rebels, who quickly learned to write eloquent and polished English; Harry McMillan of Beaufort, South Carolina, who talked frankly of black love and marriage; Charlotte Burris of Kentucky, so 'afflicted' that her husband was permitted to buy her for only $25.00--'as much as I was worth, ' she self-effacingly said; and many more. This illumination of the slave as an individual is really what the book is all about."--Journal of Southern History

"A mammoth presentation of two centuries of slave recollections . . . extraordinary firsthand narratives that should become the premier reference volume on the slave experience for years to come."--Columbia (SC) State

"The largest collection of annotated and authenticated accounts of slaves ever published in one volume. . . . So valuable a compilation is this study that its real worth cannot be measured for some time to come."--Richmond News Leader

Back Jacket

Between the covers of Slave Testimony readers will find the largest collection of annotated and authenticated accounts of slaves ever published in one volume. In them, the slaves of Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, Henry Clay, and others speak for themselves about their culture, plantation life, the adequacy of their food, clothing, and shelter, the sexual exploitation of black women, and the psychological response to bondage. The views given are those of house servants and field hands, docile slaves and rebels, urban slaves and rural slaves, slaves with kind masters and those with cruel ones. These wide-ranging documents, together with annotations, notes, an index, dozens of illustrations, and an incisive introduction, form a volume of unusual scope and character.

Author Biography

JOHN W. BLASSINGAME was professor of history at Yale University; editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers; and the author of The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South and Black New Orleans, 1860-1880