Benjamin Drew (1812–1903)

It is remarkable how similar these narratives are to the ones collected 75 years later by the Library of Congress when they sent college graduates into the South to interview elderly former slaves as a make work project during the Depression. The inhumanity of man to fellow man is unnerving and especially so when the slave owner is a minister of a church. For a sample of the remembrances of the elderly;y black men & women collected in the 1930's, find a copy of "My Folks Don't Want Me to Talk About Slavery". They tell the sames stories as those you will read in this 1856 collection.… (mer)

To say I loved this book is a bit of an incongruity. How can someone love actual accounts from American, mid-19th refugee slaves, full-blown in matter-of-fact prose? There are horrors here that will drop the most hardened cynic to their knees.

I originally picked up the book as primary research for a future novel, and found myself once again climbing aboard my human rights soap box as I did as a girl in the late '60s and early '70s.

All of the accounts in the book, originally compiled in the 19th century, are from former slaves who rode the Underground Railroad to Canada. This should be required reading.… (mer)