[Peabody was a prominent Unitarian minister in Boston and the author of several minor religious works. His review of five slave narratives, excerpted below, is widely regarded as one of the most perceptive and fair-minded assessments of the genre to appear in the nineteenth century. Peabody here acknowledges the importance of regarding slavery from the point of view of the slave, a stance that many historians and critics rejected well into the twentieth century. He also praises the narratives as literary works and outlines the horrors of slavery as described in them.]

America has the mournful honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization,—the autobiographies of escaped slaves. ... We place these volumes [slave narratives of Henry Watson, Lewis and Milton Clarke, William W. Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Josiah Henson] without hesitation among the most remarkable productions of the age,— remarkable as being pictures of slavery by the slave, remarkable as disclosing under a new light the mixed elements of American civilization, and not less remarkable as a vivid exhibition of the force and working of the native love of freedom in the individual mind.

There are those who fear lest the elements of poetry and romance should fade out of the tame and monotonous social life of modern times. There is no danger of it while there are any slaves left to seek for freedom, and to tell the story of their efforts to obtain it. There is that in the lives of men who have sufficient force of mind and heart to enable them to struggle up from hopeless bondage to the position of freemen, beside which the ordinary characters of romance are dull and tame. They encounter a whole Iliad of woes, not in plundering and enslaving others, but in recovering for themselves those rights of which they have been deprived from birth. Or if the Iliad should be thought not to present a parallel case, we know not where one who wished to write a modern Odyssey could find a better subject than in the adventures of a fugitive slave. What a combination of qualities and deeds and sufferings most fitted to attract human sympathy in each particular case!

A man born and bred a slave becomes so possessed by the idea of liberty, that neither fear, nor the habit of obedience, nor the hopelessness of deliverance, can stifle the irrepressible desire to be free. It grows, silently,—for he dares not utter it even to his companions,—year by year, until at length, whatever the consequences, he must obey this secret, ever-urging instinct of his soul. He has heard that far to the North there is a region where, could he but reach it, he would be free. He cannot read, he dares not ask questions, but he treasures up every floating hint as to the direction; he hoards up the chance money he receives, for the needs of the journey which is never out of his thoughts; as the time approaches, he hesitates on the brink of his dread enterprise, for he hears of the failure of others who have made similar attempts, and the penalties of failure are worse than death. But the unslumbering passion will not let him rest. (pp. 61-2)

One of the many unanswerable arguments which show how unfounded the assertion is that the blacks are naturally incompetent to bear the responsibilities of freedom, is derived from the fact, that in so many of them there exists this intense longing to possess it,—a sense of its value which all the appliances of slavery have not been able to crush out. Most men at the North have seen numbers of fugitive slaves. In a single town of New England with which we are acquainted, there are more than two hundred, and there cannot be less than thousands scattered through the different cities and villages; and they constitute, to say the least, as orderly, intelligent, and useful a portion of the population as the great body of foreign immigrants.

These biographies of fugitive slaves are calculated to exert a very wide influence on public opinion. We have always been familiar with slavery, as seen from the side of the master. These narratives show how it looks as seen from the side of the slave. They contain the victim's account of the working of this great institution. When one escapes from the South, and finds an opportunity of speaking and has the power to speak, it is certain that he will have attentive listeners. Not only curiosity, but a sense of justice, predisposes men to hear the testimony given by those who have suffered, and who have had few among their own number to describe their sufferings. The extent of the influence such lives must exert may be judged of, when we learn the immense circulation which has been secured for them. Of Brown's Narrative, first published in 1847, not less than eight thousand copies have been already sold. Douglass's Life, first published in 1845, has in this country alone passed through seven editions, and is, we are told, now out of print. They are scattered over the whole of the North, and all theoretical arguments for or against slavery are feeble, compared with these accounts by living men of what they personally endured when under its dominion.

These narratives are for many reasons worthy of attention. The statements they contain may be partial and prejudiced, but are not likely to be more so than are the estimates formed of slavery by those who profit from its continuance. At any rate, in forming a just judgment of this institution, it is quite as important to know what it is to Henson the slave, as what it is to McDuffie the master.

These narratives, however, do not give a full and complete view of the whole subject. There is one point of great moment, which they tend to make us forget, intead of bringing it forward into the light. We refer to the position of the antislavery men of the South. These books give the impression that the Slave States constitute one vast prisonhouse, of which all the whites without exception are the mere keepers, with no interest in the slaves further than they can be made subservient to the pleasure or profit of their owners. But this is far from being the case. It may not be, certainly it is not, a common feeling, but there is nowhere a more settled and bitter destination of slavery than is sometimes met with at the South. And, strange as it may seem, so entangled is the whole subject, so complicated are the relations and powers of the several States and of the Union, that, though the slave may find the most sympathy personally at the North, our main hope of the abolition of slavery as an institution depends on the efforts of the enemies of slavery at the South. (pp. 63-5)

These narratives, without any such intention on the part of the writers, reveal incidentally, but very vividly, some of the necessary evils of this mournful institution. The white children, in great part, grow up uneducated; for schools cannot be sustained in the country by the scattered population which alone slavery allows. In early years, they are exposed to acquiring the habit of indulging the domineering and selfish passions towards those weaker than themselves. Great numbers of men, ashamed to work, spend much of their time in gambling and horse-racing, and in unending talks about street-fights and party politics. The profits of their plantations depend on the large amount of work which they can extract from the slave, and on the small amount of food and clothing on which he can be made to live. Thus, without those checks which exist between the free laborer and his employer, there is a perpetual temptation to harshness and cruelty; and there never yet was a continuous influence of this kind brought to bear on a man, which did not finally reveal itself in the character. In addition to this, so far as the white males are concerned, there is another evil which can never be passed over when slavery is spoken of,—the temptation to licentiousness. The work marriage among the slaves has no legal, and scarcely a moral meaning. And the result of their relations with the whites is seen written ineffaceably in the variable color of the slave population. The horror of amalgamation at the South must be a qualified one. There is far less of it than at the North. A single fact is sufficient to answer all opposing arguments or assertions. In passing through the streets of New Orleans, among the first ten children you meet, there will probably be five different colors. At the South the prejudice is not against color, but against the blacks ceasing to be a servile class.

In reading these narratives, we are forcibly struck with the peculiar hardships to which the female slave is subjected. All that should in a civilized land be her protection makes her lot doubly accursed. She suffers all that the male suffers, and in addition miseries peculiar to herself. Her condition is hopeless. There are few females who, even if they could resolve to leave their children behind them, can ever hope to escape from bondage. The bearing of children, except for a very brief period, does not exempt them from labor in the fields, and this under the perpetual terror of the overseer 's lash. If they possess any attractiveness of person, they are too often exposed to the danger of becoming doubly victims, first, to the corrupting urgencies of the white males around them, and then to the jealous dislike of the females. And in addition to all, the children whom they have borne in misery are liable to be taken from them, and sold away from their knowledge into hopeless bondage. Doubtless these evils do not appear on every plantation; but exposure to them is incident to slavery, is a part of the institution, and cannot be separated from it. And these narratives show how easily exposure passes into horrible reality.

In reading these little volumes, there is another evil of American slavery whose horrors are constantly brought before the mind. We refer to the internal slave trade. If we leave out of view the physical horrors of the Middle Passage, we believe that this internal slave trade is a system more accursed, more deserving of execration, the cause of more suffering, than the direct trade from Africa. It is a horrible phantom, making miserable the whole slave population of the South. They who are never made the victims of this traffic, who live and die on the same plantation, know that, at any moment,—sometimes from the selfishness of avaricious masters, sometimes from the misfortunes or death of the kind-hearted,—they are liable to be sold to the slave-dealer who will bid highest, and sent to some other region, under circumstances which, to their ignorant imaginations, seem worse than the reality proves. When added to all other deprivations and sufferings, this horrible fear, weighing incessantly on the thoughts of millions of men and women, is itself an evil of terrible magnitude.

But a still more important consideration is to be kept in mind. The blacks of the South are no longer such as their fathers were when brought from the shores of Africa. They have ceased to be savages. In its worse or better forms, all of them have caught some tincture of civilization. The better class of slaves are more civilized, have less of the brutal about them, than the lower class of whites. With increasing civilization, there is a development of the affections, of the moral sensibilities, and of that forethought also which makes men more apprehensive of future evil. They have learned to place the same estimate on kindred and domestic bonds as their masters; and they have intelligence enough to understand the nature of those advantages which they never must look on except as blessings from whose enjoyment thay are to be for ever excluded. The very improvement, which is sometimes put forward as one of the compensations of their lot, has made them sensitive to forms of suffering from which their forefathers were protected by their more brutal condition. The coffle of slaves torn from their families, which the slave-driver conducts by slow and weary stages from Virginia to the sugar-houses of the South, is, to the eye of reason, a more mournful spectacle than the barracoons on the coast of Africa. The wretched beings subjected to this doom are not less dragged away from all to which they are most attached, and carried, powerless victims, to a region and a fate which they most of all dread, but they are capable of a more clinging and paralyzing fear, and feel with infinitely more keenness everything that tears and wounds the affections. Every truth of religion which has dawned on their minds, every domestic bond they have learned to value, every idea and sentiment of a better kind which they have insensibly derived from intercourse with a better instructed race around them, only makes them more sensitive to the lot to which they are doomed. Common humanity demands that, if this traffic—“without mercy and without natural affection ”—is to go on, the slaves should be kept as near the condition of brutes as possible. Ignorance, brutality, and callousness to every claim of the affections, if suffering only is to be thought of, constitute a boon for the slave, by putting him into a state of moral insensibility, scarcely less blessed than the state induced by that medical discovery of the present time which promises so to alleviate the physical pains of man.

Is there exaggeration in this? We wish we could believe there was; but there is not. A perpetual fear haunts the slaves, as the fear of ghosts haunts superstitious children, with the mournful difference that the slaves ' apprehensions are well founded. This dread of being torn from their families, of being sold to they know not whom, and of being sent to the cotton and sugar plantations of the Southwest, is seen running through and giving a dark coloring to all the narratives before us. In fact, the slaves are not merely liable to be thus sold, but the threat of it serves as an instrument of the police to make them submissive and industrious. It is held up constantly as a punishment for the refractory and disobedient; and that it may be more effective, every circumstance which can make it alarming to the slave's imagination is kept before him. But in trying to avoid this peril, it does not do for him to show too many of the qualities of a self-supporting manhood. The slave's path is a Mahomet's bridge. His virtues may be as dangerous to himself as his vices. If a slave is restless, intelligent, and enterprising, the master is tempted to sell him to the South, lest he should escape to freedom and the North. And no matter what the master's feelings or wishes, if he becomes poor, or dies, his slaves are always exposed, even if they be not actually subjected, to this doom.