LINDA, THE SLAVE GIRL.
William Cooper Nell, 1816-1874 FROM The Liberator, 24 January 1861.
BOSTON, January 21, 1861.
DEAR MR. GARRISON:
Crowded though I know the Liberator columns to be just now, I am constrained to solicit space for a word in announcement of a book just issued from the press, entitled
"LINDA: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, seven years concealed in Slavery." It is a handsome volume of 306 pages, and is on sale at the Anti-Slavery Office, price $1.00. I feel confident that its circulation at this crisis in our country's history will render a signal and most acceptable service.
The lamented Mrs. Follen, in her admirable tract addressed to Mothers in the Free States, and with which that indefatigable colporteur, Miss Putnam, is doing so much good in her visits to families, seems to have anticipated just such a contribution to anti-slavery literature as this book, "Linda." It presents features more attractive than many of its predecessors purporting to be histories of slave life in America, because, in contrast with their mingling of fiction with fact, this record of complicated experience in the life of a young woman, a doomed victim to America's peculiar institution—her seven years' concealment in slavery—continued
persecutions—hopes, often deferred, but which at length culminated in her freedom—surely need not the charms that any pen of fiction, however gifted and graceful, could lend. They shine by the lustre of their own truthfulness—a rhetoric which always commends itself to the wise head and honest heart. In furtherance of the object of its author, LYDIA MARIA CHILD has furnished a graceful introduction, and AMY POST, a well-written letter; and wherever the names of these two devoted friends of humanity are known, no higher credentials can be required or given. My own acquaintance, too, with the author and her relatives, of whom special mention is made in the book, warrants an expression of the hope that it will find its way into every family, where all, especially mothers and daughters, may learn yet more of the barbarism of American slavery and the character of its victims.
Yours, for breaking every yoke,
WM. C. NELL.
