Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave

This is a slave narrative written in the mid-19th century before the Civil War. From the preface: " THE present Narrative was first published in Boston, (U.S.) in July, 1847, and eight thousand copies were sold in less than eighteen months from the time of its publication. This rapid sale may be attributed to the circumstance, that for three years preceding its publication, I had been employed as a lecturing agent by the American Anti-slavery Society; and I was thus very generally known throughout the Free States of the Great Republic, as one who had spent the first twenty years of his life as a slave, in her southern house of bondage. In visiting Great Britain I had two objects in view. Firstly, I have been chosen as a delegate by "the American Peace Committee for a Congress of Nations," to attend the Peace Convention to be held in Paris during the last week of the present month, (August, 1849.) Many of the most distinguished American Abolitionists considered it a triumphant evidence of the progress of their principles, that one of the oppressed coloured race -- one who is even now, by the constitution of the United States, a slave -- should have been selected for this honourable office; and were therefore very desirous that I should attend. Secondly, I wished to follow up the work of my friends and fellow-labourers, Charles Lenox Remond and Frederick Douglas, and to lay before the people of Great Britain and Ireland the wrongs that are still committed upon the slaves and the free coloured people of America. The rapid increase of communication between the two sides of the Atlantic has brought them so close together, that the personal intercourse between the British people and American slaveowners is now very great; and the slaveholder, crafty and politic, as deliberate tyrants generally are, rarely leaves the shores of Europe without attempting at least to assuage the prevalent hostility against his beloved "peculiar institution."