Slave Narratives after Slavery

451 Pages·2011·1.98 MB·English

by  William L. Andrews


Slave Narratives
after Slavery

This page intentionally left blank

Slave Narratives
after Slavery


edited by
WILLIAM L. ANDREWS
Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further
Oxford University’s objective of excellence
in research, scholarship, and education.
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offi ces in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slave narratives after slavery / edited by William L. Andrews.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-517942-2 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-517943-9
(pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Slaves–Southern States—Biography. 2. Slaves—Southern
States—Social conditions–19th century. 3. African Americans—Biography. 4. Slaves’ writings,
American. I. Andrews, William L., 1946–
E444.S567 2011
306.3 ′ 62092—dc22
2010019589
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 
 
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
vii
NOTE ON THE TEXTS
xxxiii
1
elizabeth keckley
Behind the Scenes, or, Th irty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House
3
2
john quincy adams
Narrative of the Life of John Quincy Adams, When in Slavery,
and Now as a Freeman
131
3
william wells brown
My Southern Home: or, Th e South and Its People
157
4
lucy ann berry delaney
From the Darkness Cometh the Light; or, Struggles for Freedom
299
5
louis hughes
Th irty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom: Th e Institution of Slavery as
Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter
323
This page intentionally left blank

 
INTRODUCTION
Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was
another.” Th is realization on the part of Paul D. Garner and Sethe, the
leading characters in Toni Morrison’s novel B eloved (1987), underscores a key
transition that both of these former slaves must make as they adapt to the free-
dom that they try to create for themselves after escaping bondage. Getting free
was the fi rst step in establishing one’s right to selfhood, Paul D. and Sethe
understand. But how the freeman and freewoman staked and defended their
claims to self-ownership would determine, to a great extent, their socioeco-
nomic fate in freedom. How autobiography could represent the achievement
of self-ownership by a people who previously had been owned themselves was
a challenge that faced many formerly enslaved men and women when they
contemplated writing their autobiographies throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury. Because the post–Civil War slave narrative’s response to this challenge has
received comparatively little attention, even as interest in pre–Civil War slave
narratives has soared over the last fi fty years, Slave Narratives after Slavery is
designed to highlight some of the most salient autobiographical statements by
men and women who, having survived enslavement and pioneered the free-
dom struggle in the postwar South and North, were determined to leave their
literary mark on the newly united nation.
From the suppression of Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 to the end of the
slavery era in 1865, the fugitive slave narrative became the most widely read
genre of African American writing, far outnumbering the autobiographies of
free people of color, not to mention the handful of novels published by African
Americans. Most of the major authors of African American literature before 1865,
such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, launched
their writing careers via narratives of their experience as slaves. Infl uential
viii slave narratives after slavery
abolitionists edited, published, and prefaced some of the most famous narra-
tives of the 1840s and 1850s, when the antislavery movement crystallized its
demand for an immediate end to human bondage in the United States. Aboli-
tionists such as Th eodore Parker, a noted Transcendentalist, welcomed ante-
bellum slave narratives into the highest echelons of American literature,
insisting that “all the original romance of Americans is in them, not in the
white man’s novel” (Parker, 37). In this atmosphere a number of antebellum
slave narratives enjoyed a reception among whites unprecedented in the history
of African American letters.
Since the appearance of Benjamin Quarles’s 1960 edition of the N arrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , which had been out of print
for a little more than a century since its original publication in 1845, pre–Civil
War slave narratives have received increasingly serious scholarly attention.
Extensive study of the narratives of prominent mid-nineteenth-century fugi-
tives such as Douglass, Jacobs, Wells Brown, Sojourner Truth, Henry Bibb, and
Henry Box Brown has helped to generate new editions of their narratives, spur-
ring eff orts to recover the autobiographies of neglected pre–Civil War fi gures
such as Jeff rey Brace, William Grimes, and Moses Roper. By contrast, with the
exception of Booker T. Washington’s classic U p from Slavery (1901) and, in the
last two decades, Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes (1868), the narratives of
former slaves published after 1865 have attracted relatively few readers.
Th e autobiographies of former slaves dominated the African American
literary landscape throughout the nineteenth century, not just up to 1865.
From the turn of the nineteenth century to the end of the Civil War, eighty-
seven slave narratives, an average of 1.3 narratives each year, were published in
book or pamphlet form in the United States. Between 1866 and the publication
of Up from Slavery in 1901, fi fty-four more book-length narratives by formerly
enslaved Americans, 1.5 narratives on average annually, appeared. Major contrib-
utors to the pre–Civil War slave narrative continued to publish autobiographies
introduction ix
in the late nineteenth century. William Wells Brown brought out his fi nal
memoir, M y Southern Home (included in this volume), in 1880 in Boston.
Josiah Henson, whose 1849 narrative inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to create
Uncle Tom, kept his name in the public eye with A n Autobiography of Rev.
Josiah Henson (“Uncle Tom”) from 1789–1881 (1881). Douglass launched his L ife
and Times into print in 1881, revising it in 1882 and in 1892. N arrative of So-
journer Truth, a Bondswoman of Olden Times appeared in 1875 and in expanded
form in 1884, a year after Truth’s death. Th e large majority of ex-slave narrators
after 1865, however, were not nationally famous people, or even participants in
the antislavery movement. Th e post–Civil War ex-slave narrative represented
to a notable and unprecedented degree the length and breadth of post-emanci-
pation black America. Th e slave narrative after slavery was the most democratic
literary genre adopted by African Americans in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
Slave narratives in the post-slavery era evolved out of the national experi-
ment in Reconstruction (1865–1877), which aimed to help the defeated South
recover from the devastation of conquest and the newly freed men and women
of the South claim the rights and opportunities that emancipation seemed to
promise. Commencing only months after Union victory, Reconstruction saw
the enactment of three constitutional amendments: the Th irteenth (1865),
which abolished slavery; the Fourteenth (1868), which guaranteed equal pro-
tection under the law for people of African descent; and the Fifteenth (1870),
which granted the ballot to black men. Th is legislation, along with the found-
ing of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865, gave freed people from the South and
their advocates hope for genuine social, political, and economic reform in the
former Confederacy. Reform, however, made sporadic and spotty headway in
the postwar South, where many whites resisted federal eff orts to eliminate dis-
criminatory “black codes,” exploitative labor contracts, electoral intimidation
and fraud, and night-riding white terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.