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Cultural movement · 1789–1865

Slave Narratives

First-person accounts by the formerly enslaved became one of America's most powerful literary and political forms — eyewitness testimony that armed the abolitionist cause.

Long before the Civil War, formerly enslaved people picked up the pen and told their own stories. Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative and Harriet Jacobs's 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are the masterpieces of the genre, but hundreds were published — and in the 1930s the Federal Writers' Project recorded more than 2,300 interviews with people who had been enslaved.

These narratives did political work: they put a human face and an undeniable voice to an institution defenders preferred to discuss in abstractions. They are also literature of the first order, and the foundation of the entire African American literary tradition.

On the timeline

  1. April 1841
    Solomon Northup is kidnapped into slavery

    A free Black New Yorker is drugged, kidnapped, and sold South — twelve years later his memoir exposes the kidnapping of free people.

  2. May 1845
    Frederick Douglass publishes his Narrative

    Douglass's autobiography becomes a landmark of American letters and the abolitionist cause.

  3. March 23, 1849
    Henry "Box" Brown mails himself to freedom

    Henry Brown is sealed in a crate and shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia, arriving alive after 27 hours — one of the most audacious escapes ever.

  4. 1861
    Harriet Jacobs publishes "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

    One of the only slave narratives written by a woman lays bare the sexual exploitation at the heart of slavery — and seven years Jacobs spent hidden in a crawlspace to escape it.

The web

Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations — the links rarely drawn together.