A) Stop by the Bullis Room and take a look at the collection's copy published in 1847 in Boston at the Anti-slavery office; and,
B) Get a copy (through PLS or your friendly online bookseller) and sit down for a good read.
This is a book that will grab your interest from the very beginning. In fact, a letter from the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, dated April 22, 1845, is printed in the Preface. In it, Phillips declares:
"I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the
most neglected of God's children waken to a sense of their rights, and of the
injustice done them. Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had
mastered your A B C, or knew where the 'white sails' of the
Chesapeake were bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the
slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel
and blighting death which gathers over his soul.
"In connection with this, there is one circumstance
which makes your recollections peculiarly valuable, and renders your early
insight the more remarkable. You come from that part of the country where we
are told slavery appears with its fairest features. Let us hear, then, what it
is at its best estate—gaze on its bright side, if it has one; and then
imagination may task her powers to add dark lines to the picture, as she
travels southward to that (for the colored man) Valley of the Shadow of Death,
where the Mississippi sweeps along.
"Again, we have known you long, and can put the most
entire confidence in your truth, candor, and sincerity. Every one who has heard
you speak has felt, and, I am confident, every one who reads your book will
feel, persuaded that you give them a fair specimen of the whole truth. No
one-sided portrait,—no wholesale complaints,—but strict justice done, whenever
individual kindliness has neutralized, for a moment, the deadly system with
which it was strangely allied. You have been with us, too, some years, and can
fairly compare the twilight of rights, which your race enjoy at the North, with
that "noon of night" under which they labor south of Mason and
Dixon's line. Tell us whether, after all, the half-free colored man of
Massachusetts is worse off than the pampered slave of the rice swamps!"
Again, we strongly suggest you spend some time with Frederick Douglass's book which, according to the abolitionist Phillips, is written with truth, candor and sincerity.
