Mary Prince (1) (1788–1833)

Read for a graduate seminar on Human Rights - while this account of slavery is harrowing, I think it falls short in being mediated through the words of a white woman and presented as a means of propaganda for the mostly-white Anti Slavery Society. Thus what I want more of is Mary Prince's own voice and story and less of the white publisher's call to action- no matter how righteous the cause.

Before the end of the civil war, over one hundred former slaves had written moving stories of their captivity and by 1944, when George washington Carver published his autobiography, over six thousand ex-slaves ahd written what caalled slave narratives. No group of slaves anywhere, in any other ear, has left such prolific testimony to the horror of bondage and servitude.

Frederick Douglass's account is searing. The plantation owners create a system of unremitting torture and terror. Slaves are whipped for no reason, forced to work every moment of the day, and are always hungry for lack of food. Douglass rebels, and, impossibly, survives.