Bücher von Mattie Griffith

This edition of Madge Vertner was produced with the assistance of Accessible Archives.Mattie Griffith's pre-Civil War abolitionist novel Madge Vertner is a fictional portrait of American slavery told from the perspective of the young daughter of a wealthy southern slave owner. Originally serialized from 1859 to 1860 in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly abolitionist newspaper edited by Lydia Maria Child, it has never been published in novel form until now. Madge Vertner not only reveals the brutality and horror of slavery, but also raises many questions of race, gender, and equality that still resonate in American society today.

In the pages of this putative autobiography the author poses as a slave for the purpose of bringing attention to the injustice of slavery. The actual author Mattie Griffith, passing as a black, wanted her book to horrify and shame the nation. Pseudo-slave narratives like Griffith's appeared over the course of the abolitionist movement, and this is the only one now in print.