WITHIN the last four years, many hundreds, probably thousands, of persons in our nominally free States, have seen Peter Still, a neat, staid black man, going from city to city, town to town, house to house, asking assistance to enable him to purchase the freedom of his wife and children. He has always been grateful for the smallest favors, and never morose when utterly denied. He has not obtruded himself or his story; but those who have shown curiosity enough to make any inquiries, have been soon led to suspect that he was no common man; that the events of his life had been thrillingly interesting--some of them even more wonderful than we often meet with in works of fiction. Kidnapped, in his early childhood, from the door-step of his home in New Jersey; more than forty years a slave in Kentucky and Alabama; his unsuccessful appeal to the great Henry Clay; his liberation through the generosity of a Jew; his restoration to his mother by the guidance of the slightest threads of memory; the yearning of his heart for his loved ones; the heroic but disastrous attempt of Concklin to bring his wife and children to him--wherever these incidents of his life were detailed, they seldom failed to draw from the hand of the listener some contribution towards the exorbitant sum demanded for the liberation of his family.

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Originally published in 1856, "The Kidnapped and the Ransomed" is the personal recollection of Peter Still, a black slave. He was stolen as a child from his home in New Jersey, yoked to servitude for more than forty years in Kentucky and Alabama, and finally freed with the help of a pair of Jewish brothers. It is the only nineteenth-century slave narrative to show the participation of the Jews in the antislavery movement before the Civil War. The reader follows Still through a succession of brutal masters, a clandestine courtship, marriage involving separation, births and deaths, the formation of a daring plan for freedom, and harrowing action. No stage drama could be as wrenching as this true rendering of a slave's experience in America. Kate E. R. Pickard was in contact with Still while she taught at the Female Seminary in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Maxwell Whiteman was the archival and historical consultant for the Union League of Philadelphia and coauthor, with Edwin Wolf II, of The History of the Jews of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the Age of Jackson. The original introduction by Rev. Samuel J. May, an abolitionist, has been retained.

Mrs. Pickard's ability to turn Peter Still's life into a narrative that faithfully reflected the miseries and the horrors of plantation slavery places it among the outstanding accounts of slave life.-Maxwell Whiteman, in his introductory essay. Originally published in 1856, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed is the personal recollection of Peter Still, a black slave. He was stolen as a child from his home in New Jersey, yoked to servitude for more than forty years in Kentucky and Alabama, and finally freed with the help of a pair of Jewish brothers. It is the only nineteenth-century slave narrative to show the participation of the Jews in the antislavery movement before the Civil War. The reader follows Still through a succession of brutal masters, a clandestine courtship, marriage involving separation, births and deaths, the formation of a daring plan for freedom, and harrowing action. No stage drama could be as wrenching as this true rendering of a slave's experience in America. Kate E. R. Pickard was in contact with Still while she taught at the Female Seminary in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Maxwell Whiteman was the archival and historical consultant for the Union League of Philadelphia and coauthor, with Edwin Wolf II, of The History of the Jews of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the Age of Jackson. The original introduction by Rev. Samuel J. May, an abolitionist, has been retained. Introducing this Bison Books edition is Nancy L. Grant, a professor of history at Washington University, St. Louis, and author of TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo.

Originally published in 1856, "The Kidnapped and the Ransomed" is the personal recollection of Peter Still, a black slave. He was stolen as a child from his home in New Jersey, yoked to servitude for more than forty years in Kentucky and Alabama, and finally freed with the help of a pair of Jewish brothers. It is the only nineteenth-century slave narrative to show the participation of the Jews in the antislavery movement before the Civil War. The reader follows Still through a succession of brutal masters, a clandestine courtship, marriage involving separation, births and deaths, the formation of a daring plan for freedom, and harrowing action. No stage drama could be as wrenching as this true rendering of a slave's experience in America. Kate E. R. Pickard was in contact with Still while she taught at the Female Seminary in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Maxwell Whiteman was the archival and historical consultant for the Union League of Philadelphia and coauthor, with Edwin Wolf II, of The History of the Jews of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the Age of Jackson. The original introduction by Rev. Samuel J. May, an abolitionist, has been retained.