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[SLAVE NARRATIVE]. HUGHES, Louis (1832-1913). Thirty Years a Slave. From Bondage to Freedom. The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter. Milwaukee: South Side Printing Company, 1897]. 8vo. Illustrated with portrait frontispiece and seven plates of currency inserted throughout. 210, [2, blank] pp. Publisher’s full purple cloth, front board and spine stamped and lettered in silver, floral endleaves (boards rubbed with occasional minor soiling, spine rubbed with some minor loss to silver-stamped letters, endleaves toned, ffep chipped at outer margin, hinges starting, a few leaves with minor wear at outer margin). Fine. THE SCARCE FIRST EDITION OF THIS INCREDIBLE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FORMER SLAVE. Hughes was born into slavery and sold away from his mother (whom he never saw again) at the age of 12. He spent 30 years in bondage, eventually escaping with the paid help of Union soldiers at the end of the Civil War. This gripping narrative relates the horrors of slavery, including Hughes being forced to watch his wife’s whipping. It also reflects the strength of the human spirit, in which Hughes liberates his wife, leaves the South with her, eventually settles in Milwaukee, and his tear-filled reunion with his brother, whom he hadn’t seen since his childhood. “The self-liberation of thousands of African Americans held in bondage is one of the great stories in the ongoing human struggle against oppression ... Louis Hughes’s narrative is one of the most informative, insightful, and hopeful accounts of how Americans of color created their own freedom in the midst of a slave society.” (Richard Newman, Senior Research Officer, W. E. B. DuBois Institute).