length antebellum narratives is relatively small - roughly 200 in all and only one by a woman (Jacobs, 1861). Together with the shorter accounts published before 1865, including interviews and oral histories printed in periodicals, however, scholars now estimate there to be as many as 6,000 surviving narratives of survivors of North American slavery; and combined with the 2,300 or so FWP interviews with formerly enslaved persons in the late 1930s, there is therefore a rich body of evidence on slavery in the United States from the perspective of the enslaved themselves. ${ }^{1}$  
Dismissed by most historians until the 1950s as abolitionist propaganda, the nineteenth-century narratives have become indispensable sources for historians of slavery. The early black voices attesting to the cruelties of racial slavery and oppression have also shaped much of the corpus of modern African American literature. Whether the narrators wrote their own accounts, as in the case of Douglass (1845) and Jacobs (1861), or told their story to an interviewer or amanuensis, they were united in their ability to go beyond abolitionist critique and counter proslavery arguments with painful memories of their own personal experience. The most searing passages inevitably involve the loss or abuse of family members, such as Thomas H. Jones' recollection of the powerlessness of his mother watching his sister stripped naked and whipped:
[I] stood by my mother, who was wringing her hands in an agony of grief, at the cruelties which her tender child was enduring. I do not know what my sister had done for which she was then whipped: but I remember that her body was marked and scarred for weeks after that terrible scourging, and that our parents always after seemed to hold their breath when they spoke of it (Jones, 1854, p. 9).