Читать книгу Chains and Freedom: or, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wheeler, a Colored Man Yet Living онлайн

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He has many times, for many years, related the same facts, to many persons, in the same language verbatim; and individuals to whom the author has read some of the following incidents, have recognized the story and language, as they heard them from the hero’s lips long before the author ever heard his name. There are also persons yet living, whom I have seen and known, who witnessed many of Peter’s most awful sufferings.

Of course, the book lays no claim to the merit of literature, and will not be reviewed as such; but it does claim the merit of strict verity, which is no mean characteristic in a book, in these days.

The subject, and the author, have but one object in view in bringing the book before the public:—a mutual desire to contribute as far as they can, to the freedom of enchained millions for whom Christ died. And if any heart may be made to feel one emotion of benevolence, and lift up a more earnest cry to God for the suffering slave; if one generous impulse may be awakened in a slaveholder’s bosom towards his fellow traveller to God’s bar, whose crime is, in being “born with a skin not coloured like his own;” and if it may inspire in the youthful mind, the spirit of that sweet verse, consecrated by the hallowed associations of a New-England home—