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    The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina
    The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina
    The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina
    Ebook78 pages1 hour

    The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina

    By John Andrew Jackson

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    About this ebook

    In The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, escaped slave John Andrew Jackson seeks to educate his readers on the horrors of slavery. He spares no details in relating the murder of his sister, the separation of his family, and his own frequent whippings at the hands of a "Christian" master and mistress. He offers a scathing review of white religious hypocrisy, criticizing those who could not see the contradiction between worshiping a merciful God on Sundays and holding slaves under inhumane conditions. Jackson details his escape from slavery into Massachusetts as a ship stowaway after he is separated by sale from his first wife and child. He also describes his interactions with Harriet Beecher Stowe; his failed attempts to purchase the freedom of his family members; and his eventual escape into Canada following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. His work also includes a variety of carefully recorded hymns and antislavery songs. Jackson would eventually flee to England with his second wife before returning to South Carolina after the War.

    A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available in paperback and e-book formats. Each book contains a short summary and is otherwise unaltered from the original publication. DocSouth Books provide affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUNC at Chapel Hill Library
    Release dateSep 1, 2011
    ISBN9780807869567
    The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina
    Author

    John Andrew Jackson

    John Andrew Jackson was born a slave on a plantation in Sumter County, South Carolina, and escaped slavery in 1846; he published The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina in 1862 to educate his readership on the often unspoken horrors of slavery.

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      Book preview

      The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina - John Andrew Jackson

      The Experience of

      a Slave in South

      Carolina

      By John Andrew Jackson

      A DocSouth Books Edition

      The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library

      Chapel Hill

      A DocSouth Books Edition, 2011

      ISBN 978-0-8078-6955-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

      Published by

      The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library

      CB #3900 Davis Library

      Chapel Hill, NC 27514-8890

      http://library.unc.edu

      Documenting the American South

      http://docsouth.unc.edu

      docsouth@unc.edu

      Distributed by

      The University of North Carolina Press

      116 South Boundary Street

      Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808

      1-800-848-6224

      http://www.uncpress.org

      This book was digitally printed.

      About This Edition

      This edition is made available under the imprint of DocSouth Books, a collaborative endeavor between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library and the University of North Carolina Press. Titles in DocSouth Books are drawn from the Library’s Documenting the American South (DocSouth) digital publishing program, online at docsouth.unc.edu. These print and downloadable e-book editions have been prepared from the DocSouth electronic editions.

      Both DocSouth and DocSouth Books present the transcribed content of historic books as they were originally published. Grammar, punctuation, spelling, and typographical errors are therefore preserved from the original editions. DocSouth Books are not intended to be facsimile editions, however. Details of typography and page layout in the original works have not been preserved in the transcription.

      DocSouth Books editions incorporate two pagination schemas. First, standard page numbers reflecting the pagination of this edition appear at the top of each page for easy reference. Second, page numbers in brackets within the text (e.g., [Page 9]) refer to the pagination of the original publication; online versions of the DocSouth works use this same original pagination. Page numbers shown in tables of contents and book indexes, when present, refer to the original works’ printed page numbers and therefore correspond to the page numbers in brackets.

      [Title Page Image]

      THE EXPERIENCE

      OF A SLAVE IN

      SOUTH CAROLINA.

      BY

      JOHN ANDREW JACKSON.

      London:

      PRINTED BY PASSMORE & ALABASTER, WILSON STREET, FINSBURY.

      1862.

      ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL.

      FAC-SIMILE OF THE GIMLET WHICH I USED TO BORE A HOLE IN THE DECK OF

      THE VESSEL. (SEE PAGE 27.)

      [Title Page Verso Image]

      [page iii]PREFACE.

      IN aiming to arrest the attention of the reader, ere he proceeds to the unvarnished, but ower true tale of John Andrew Jackson, the escaped Carolinian slave, it might be fairly said that truth was stranger than fiction, and that the experience of slavery produces a full exhibition of all that is vile and devilish in human nature.

      Mrs. Stowe, as a virtuous woman, dared only allude to some of the hellish works of slavery—it was too foul to sully her pen; but the time is come when iniquity should no longer be hid: and that evil which Wilberforce and Clarkson exposed, and of which Wesley said it was the sum of all human villainies, must now be laid bare in all its hellish atrocities. The half has not yet been told; but appalling as are the statements made, yet when the fiercest organized effort to extend the monster evil of North-American slavery is being made, every patriot is called on to sympathize over the woes and sufferings of human kind, and plead for freedom and liberty.

      Cowper long ago told his fellow-countryman that

      "Skins may differ, but affection

      Dwells in white and black the same."

      Therefore, kind reader, we ask your sympathy, while you peruse some of the iniquities perpetrated upon a suffering race, and that too often by men and women calling themselves Christians, and using a religious cloak to screen their monstrous, foul, and cruel acts.

      Shrink not, gentle reader, when those fearful atrocities are brought before your notice. Such narratives as Jackson's are wanted to arouse the people. The evil is afar off, and interested parties say, Don't believe it; it is false, or it is exaggerated. Not so; the worst cannot be told. You cannot speak out, or tell a fraction of the [Page iv] horrid scenes enacted, where every child and feeble woman is at the brutal mercy of brutalised man; where marriage is a fiction, and five millions of people live practically in a state of unrecognised whoredom and polygamy.

      Would that English mothers and English daughters could feel as they ought for those whose virtue and honour, whose life and liberty, may be purchased by any libertine wretch, who has the almighty dollar in plenty in his pocket. Let us but think of our sisters, our wives, our children, and thank God with them, that

      "I was not born a little slave

      To labour in the sun;

      To wish I was but in my grave,

      And all my labour done."

      Many an English reader, knowing that every year we pay a million of money as interest for the twenty millions by which the freedom of West Indian slaves was purchased, and spend nearly another million to keep down the slave trade of America, Cuba, and Brazil, are very earnest in declaring their abhorrence of American slavery, and, like the Times, finds fault with President Lincoln's government for not putting an end to slavery by proclamation, thinking that our British hands are quite clean. But they forget the share that England has had in the bondage of the human race. Liverpool and Bristol for years was the seat of the African slave trade; and, once upon a time, G. F. Cooke, the actor, on the boards of a Liverpool theater, when displeased

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