Austin Steward

Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman Austin Steward

The author does not think that any apology is necessary for this issue of his Life and History. He believes that American Slavery is now the great question before the American People: that it is not merely a political question, coming up before the country as the grand element in the making of a President, and then to be laid aside for four years; but that its moral bearings are of such a nature that the Patriot, the Philanthropist, and all good men agree that it is an evil of so much magnitude, that longer to permit it, is to wink at sin, and to incur the righteous judgments of God. The late outrages and aggressions of the slave power to possess itself of new soil and extend the influence of the hateful and God-provoking "Institution," is a practical commentary upon its benefits and the moral qualities of those who seek to sustain and extend it. The author is therefore the more willing-nay, anxious, to lay alongside of such arguments the history of his own life and experiences as a slave, that those who read may know what some of the characteristics of that highly favored institution are, which is sought to be preserved and perpetuated. "Facts are stubborn things,"-and this is the reason why all systems, religious, moral, or social, which are founded in injustice, and supported by fraud and robbery, suffer so much by faithful exposition.