Twelve Years a Slave and Other Slave Narratives

"Reader be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true."—Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Before slavery was outlawed in the United States in 1865, most free Americans had little understanding of this brutal institution. One of the abolitionist movement’s few tools for illustrating its horrors was the slave narrative. Memoirs written by former slaves provided hard-hitting eyewitness accounts...