Your opportunities of observing the workings of this accursed system have been singularly great.  Your experiences in the Field, in the House, and especially on the River in the service of the slave-trader, Walker, have been such as few individuals have had;—­no one, certainly, who has been competent to describe them.  What I have admired, and marvelled at, in your Narrative, is the simplicity and calmness with which you describe scenes and actions which might well “move the very stones to rise and mutiny” against the National Institution which makes them possible.

You will perceive that I have made very sparing use of your flattering permission to alter what you had written.  To correct a few errors, which appeared to be merely clerical ones, committed in the hurry of composition, under unfavorable circumstances, and to suggest a few curtailments, is all that I have ventured to do.  I should be a bold man, as well as a vain one, if I should attempt to improve your descriptions of what you have seen and suffered.  Some of the scenes are not unworthy of De Foe himself.

I trust and believe that your Narrative will have a wide circulation.  I am sure it deserves it.  At least, a man must be differently constituted from me, who can rise from the perusal of your Narrative without feeling that he understands slavery better, and hates it worse, than he ever did before.

I am, very faithfully and respectfully,

Your friend,

Edmund Quincy.

PREFACE.

The friends of freedom may well congratulate each other on the appearance of the following Narrative.  It adds another volume to the rapidly increasing anti-slavery literature of the age.  It has been remarked by a close observer of human nature, “Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws;” and it may with equal truth be said, that, among a reading people like our own, their books will at least give character to their laws.  It is an influence which goes forth noiselessly upon its mission, but fails not to find its way to many a warm heart, to kindle on the altar thereof the fires of freedom, which will one day break forth in a living flame to consume oppression.

This little book is a voice from the prison-house, unfolding the deeds of darkness which are there perpetrated.  Our cause has received efficient aid from this source.  The names of those who have come from thence, and battled manfully for the right, need not to be recorded here.  The works of some of them are an enduring monument of praise, and their perpetual record shall be found in the grateful hearts of the redeemed bondman.