HUGHES, Louis.

£6,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington

Thirty Years a Slave. First edition of "one of the most detailed first-hand descriptions of slavery available in the entire slave narrative tradition. In his under-appreciated autobiography, Louis Hughes accomplishes the remarkable literary feat of recording with equal conviction both the injustices of slavery and the capacities of African Americans, while enduring enslavement, to resist demoralization and victimhood" (Andrews).Hughes was born in Virginia in 1832, the son of a white plantation owner and an enslaved mother. Separated from his mother and sold as a boy, he was enslaved in Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi from 1844 until the closing months of the Civil War. His fifth escape attempt succeeded: he reached Union lines in 1865 and returned with two Union soldiers to free his family and friends.Hughes gives a frank and moving account of his enslavement, his repeated escape attempts, and the punishments that followed. He describes slave markets and auctions, religious life and celebrations among the enslaved, plantation management, hired-out labour, and systems of reward and punishment, while recounting the ordeal of continuing to serve a Confederate enslaver during the final years of the Civil War.

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