Slave Narratives after Slavery

The post-Civil War slave narrative isn't nearly so well known or widely taught as the antebellum texts by Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Box Brown, and others. But now that these antebellum narratives have taken their rightful place in courses in American literature, not to mention African American literature, it's time to make available four representative post-Civil War narratives, to ensure that teachers and readers understand the richness of the slave narrative and its continuing socio-political import after Emancipation.
Few people know that there were almost as many narratives of slavery published in the fifty years following the end of slavery as there were during the fifty years before abolition. Post-Civil War narratives don't merely recapitulate the themes and issues of the antebellum texts. Postwar narratives have a more varied agenda, owing largely to the fact that their authors did not have to adhere so closely to the antislavery movement's priorities and aims. Postwar narratives compare life in freedom to life in slavery in ways that most antebellum narrators do not pursue, for instance. Postwar narratives bring the issue of class and economic mobility among black people, particularly after Emancipation, into much greater focus than appears in the antebellum narratives.

E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, University of North Carolina

- Introduction (with bibliography)
- Note on the text
- Introduction to Keckley and Behind the Scenes
- Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (New York: G.W. Carleton, 1868).
- Introduction to Adams and Narrative of the Life
- John Quincy Adams, Narrative of the Life of John Quincy Adams, When in Slavery, and Now as a Freeman (Harrisburg, Pa.: Sieg, 1872).
- Introduction to Brown and My Southern Home
- William Wells Brown, My Southern Home, or, The South and Its People (Boston: A. G. Brown and Co., Publishers, 1880).
- Introduction to Delaney and From the Darkness Cometh the Light
- Lucy Ann Berry Delaney, From the Darkness Cometh the Light; or, Struggles for Freedom (St. Louis: J. T. Smith, 1891).
- Introduction to Hughes and Thirty Years a Slave
- Hughes, Louis, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom: The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter (Milwaukee: South Side Printing Company, 1897).