University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

The scenes of this story, as its title indicates, lie
among a race hitherto ignored by the associations of
polite and refined society; an exotic race, whose
ancestors, born beneath a tropic sun, brought
with them, and perpetuated to their descendants, a
character so essentially unlike the hard and dominant
Anglo-Saxon race, as for many years to have
won from it only misunderstanding and contempt.

But, another and better day is dawning; every
influence of literature, of poetry and of art, in our
times, is becoming more and more in unison with
the great master chord of Christianity, “good will
to man.”

The poet, the painter, and the artist, now seek
out and embellish the common and gentler humanities
of life, and, under the allurements of fiction,

breathe a humanizing and subduing influence, favorable
to the development of the great principles of
Christian brotherhood.

The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched
out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating
distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and
sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed,
and the forgotten.

In this general movement, unhappy Africa at last
is remembered; Africa, who began the race of
civilization and human progress in the dim, gray
dawn of early time, but who, for centuries, has lain
bound and bleeding at the foot of civilized and Christianized
humanity, imploring compassion in vain.

But the heart of the dominant race, who have been
her conquerors, her hard masters, has at length been
turned towards her in mercy; and it has been seen
how far nobler it is in nations to protect the feeble
than to oppress them. Thanks be to God, the world
has at last outlived the slave-trade!

The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy
and feeling for the African race, as they exist
among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under
a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to

defeat and do away the good effects of all that
can be attempted for them, by their best friends,
under it.

In doing this, the author can sincerely disclaim
any invidious feeling towards those individuals who,
often without any fault of their own, are involved in
the trials and embarrassments of the legal relations
of slavery.

Experience has shown her that some of the
noblest of minds and hearts are often thus involved;
and no one knows better than they do, that what
may be gathered of the evils of slavery from
sketches like these, is not the half that could be
told, of the unspeakable whole.

In the northern states, these representations may,
perhaps, be thought caricatures; in the southern
states are witnesses who know their fidelity. What
personal knowledge the author has had, of the truth
of incidents such as here are related, will appear in
its time.

It is a comfort to hope, as so many of the world's
sorrows and wrongs have, from age to age, been lived
down, so a time shall come when sketches similar

to these shall be valuable only as memorials of what
has long ceased to be.

When an enlightened and Christianized community
shall have, on the shores of Africa, laws,
language and literature, drawn from among us,
may then the scenes of the house of bondage be to
them like the remembrance of Egypt to the
Israelite, — a motive of thankfulness to Him who
hath redeemed them!

For, while politicians contend, and men are
swerved this way and that by conflicting tides of
interest and passion, the great cause of human
liberty is in the hands of one, of whom it is said: