The White Slave by Richard Hildreth
April 2022
This famous abolitionist novel, The White Slave: Another Picture of Slave Life in America, transcribed from the 1852 London edition which was an enlarged version of the original, published in Boston in 1836 with the title The Slave: or, Memoirs of Archy Moore, is often assumed to be non-fiction, the actual memoirs of a light-skinned former American slave. Richard Hildreth, after all, was the pre-eminent historian of early American history, having authored the six-volume History of the United States of America, covering the period 1497–1821. So the confusion was natural.
Summary of the story: Archy is the light-skinned son of a Virginia plantation owner who finds that neither his looks nor his familial relationship with his owner—his natural father—protect him from the repercussions and cruelties of being owned property. His life story demonstrates time and again the illogic and twisted morality of the slave-owning South in the 19th century, when the writing was already on the wall that such an evil could not long be allowed to continue.
As Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Summary of the story: Archy is the light-skinned son of a Virginia plantation owner who finds that neither his looks nor his familial relationship with his owner—his natural father—protect him from the repercussions and cruelties of being owned property. His life story demonstrates time and again the illogic and twisted morality of the slave-owning South in the 19th century, when the writing was already on the wall that such an evil could not long be allowed to continue.
As Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”