During the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of biographies and memoirs written by slaves who had won their freedom were published in the North as part of the Abolition movement, the effort to ban slavery in the United States. These were typically the stories of people who had been born into slavery in the South, and who managed to make their way to the Northern states and a new life. The very act of writing a book, and of stating an articulate case for the intelligence and strength of African Americans, was an important tool in the struggle to end slavery in the United States, because it showed that freed slaves had the mental capacity to function independently. Publishers knew that most readers of these narratives would be white, because they.....
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