Presents the story of American slavery from its origins in Africa to its abolition with the end of the Civil War. Firsthand accounts bring the reader face to face with slavery's everyday reality, expertly weaving together narratives that span hundreds of years. Includes excerpts from the travel journals of sixteenth-century Spanish settlers who offered religious instruction and 'protection' in exchange for farm labor, the diaries of poetess Phillis Wheatley and the Reverend Cotton Mather, Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted's book about traveling through the 'cotton states,' and an 1880 speech given by Frederick Douglass. Rae also draws on a wide variety of accounts from less distinguished individuals: a surgeon describes the brutal treatment and squalid conditions onboard a slave ship as he made his daily rounds to collect the dead; an Englishman visiting Haiti observes violent uprisings as, separated from the population on the mainland, slaves were able to overpower their captors. Most significant are the texts from and interviews with former slaves themselves, ranging from the famous Solomon Northup to the virtually unknown Mary Reynolds, who was sold away from her mother and then bought back because after losing her daughter, the family's wet nurse began to waste away from grief.
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