The great stain

Draws on personal accounts from the transatlantic slave trade era to share firsthand insights into what slavery was actually like from the perspectives of former slaves, slave owners, and African slavers.

"Comprising personal accounts from an intensely consequential chapter in our country's history, The Great Stain tells the story of American slavery from its origins in Africa to its abolition with the end of the Civil War. In this 'essential' (Kirkus) new work, Noel Rae integrates firsthand accounts into a narrative history that brings the reader face to face with slavery's everyday reality, expertly weaving together narratives that span hundreds of years. From the travel journals of sixteenth-century Spanish settlers who offered religious instruction and 'protection' in exchange for farm labor, to the diaries of poetess Phillis Wheatley and Reverend Cotton Mather, to Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted's book about traveling through the 'cotton states,' to an 1880 speech given by Frederick Douglass, Rae provides a comprehensive accounting of parties from throughout the antebellum history of the nation. Rae also draws on a wide variety of accounts from less distinguished individuals: a surgeon describes the brutal treatment and squalid conditions onboard a slave ship as he made his daily rounds to collect the dead; an Englishman visiting Haiti observes violent uprisings as, separated from the population on the mainland, slaves were able to overpower their captors.