Slave Testimony

Book excerpt: “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