Introduction

The introduction explores the concept of privilege as it is discussed in mid-century slave narratives. Slaves were denied constitutional and legal rights accorded to American whites, but privileges—sought or received, earned or negotiated, won or lost—shaped the lives of many mid-century narrators, especially the most famous ones, as their narratives make amply clear. A privilege could bring enhanced material resources, social advantages, or prerogatives that could make an almost unbearable bondage to some degree more tolerable. Access to privileges was a major basis for social distinctions and rankings among the enslaved. Slave narratives indicate that the higher one’s socioeconomic status in slavery, the better one’s chances were of escaping. Most of the sixty-one slave narratives examined in this book came from persons who launched themselves into freedom from positions of relative privilege in the upper echelons of slavery.