Читать книгу Illustrated Edition of the Life and Escape of Wm. Wells Brown from American Slavery - William Wells Brown - Страница 2

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 Antislavery 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, to attend the Peace Convention held in Paris, in August, 1849, to which I had been delegated by the American Peace Committee for a Congress of Nations. 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 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.” The influence of the Southern States of America is mainly directed to the maintenance and propagation of the system of slavery in their own and in other countries. In the pursuit of tins object, every consideration of religion, liberty, national strength, and social order is made to give way; and hitherto they have been very successful. The actual number of the slaveholders is small; but their union is complete, so that they form a dominant oligarchy in the United States. It is my desire, in common with every Abolitionist, to diminish their influence; and this can only be effected by the promulgation of truth and the cultivation of a correct public sentiment at home and abroad. Slavery cannot be let alone. It is aggressive, and must be either succumbed to or put down.

In putting forth the eighth edition of this little book, I cannot but express a surprise that a work written hastily, and that too by one who never had a day’s schooling, should have met with so extensive a sale.

In committing my narrative once more to the public, I cannot do so without returning my heartfelt thanks to the gentlemen connected with the English press, for the very kind manner in which they have noticed it, and thereby aided in getting it before the public.

WILLIAM WELLS BROWN

22, Cecil Street, Strand. May, 1851.