Thirty Years A Slave

Written by Louis Hughes

Narrated by LibriVox Community

Louis Hughes was born a slave near Charlottesville, Virginia to a white father and a black slave woman. Throughout his life he worked mostly as a house servant, but was privy to the intimate details and workings of the entire McGee cotton plantation and empire.In Thirty Years A Slave Hughes provides vivid descriptions and explicit accounts of how the McGee plantation in Mississippi, and the McGee mansion in Tennessee functioned--accounts of the lives of the many slaves that lived, suffered and sometimes died under the cruel and unusual punishments meted out by Boss and his monstrously unstable and vindictive wife. He described the profane manner in which this peculiar institution dehumanized, on a daily basis, not only the black man but even more so the white man.Ultimately, Thirty Years A Slave is an expression of Hughes’s desire to accurately describe the nature of the influence that the institution of slavery had on this country during the two hundred years in which it existed here, and the influence it continues to have on the heart and soul of a post-Civil War, post-14th Amendment United States. (Introduction by James K. White)

• Language: English
• Publisher: LibriVox
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014

Louis Hughes

LOUIS HUGHES (1832-1913) was an African American enslaved person born in Virginia. He was enslaved for over thirty years, spending most of that time in Tennessee. During that time, he learned in secret how to read and write. Thirty-three years after gaining freedom at the end of the Civil War, he wrote his memoir Thirty Years a Slave, published in 1897. It is considered an essential text for understanding the experience of slavery in western Tennessee. Hughes died in Milwaukee in 1913.

Reviews for Thirty Years A Slave

[Veronica Brown · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

His fifth attempt at freedom was successful. He never accepted being a slave. He was intelligent and kind. He and his wife made a success of their lives. Found their family members whom they had been separated from by cruel and sadistic slave owners. It’s wonderful to listen to it strengthens me to know that if they could make made it through astronomical odds. I can make through anything.