An Emancipated Woman's Account of Escape and Life After Slavery "Silvia Dubois: A Biografy of the Slav who Whipt her Mistres and Gand her Fredom", First Edition 1883

Silvia Dubois

First Edition

[Slavery & Abolition] Larison, C. W. Silvia Dubois (Now 116 Yers Old): A Biografy of the Slav who Whipt her Mistres and Gand her Fredom (1883) documents the life of an African American woman born into slavery in New Jersey. It is one of the few nineteenth-century printed narratives centered on Northern enslavement and Black female self-emancipation. Based on interviews conducted in 1883 with Silvia Dubois, who recounts being sold at age fourteen to tavern keepers in Great Bend, Pennsylvania, the work records her account of physical abuse, her act of striking her enslaver in self-defense, and her subsequent flight to freedom. The text offers a rare printed testimony of slavery in the North, highlighting violence endured by enslaved people and resistance. Larison's writing attempts to mirror Dubois's speech pattern and preserve the her account as an authentic oral history.
Larison, C. W. Silvia Dubois (Now 116 Yers Old): A Biografy of the Slav who Whipt her Mistres and Gand her Fredom. Ringoes, N.J.: C.W. Larison Publishing, 1883. First edition. The text is printed almost entirely in Larison’s experimental phonetic spelling system, which he termed “Phonic Orthography,” intended to capture Dubois’s speech patterns. An explanatory note and publisher advertisements appear in conventional spelling at the rear. Octavo. 124, [8] pages. Frontispiece portrait and two full-page illustrations. Original olive green cloth binding. No dust jacket, as issued.

The biography occupies a distinctive place within African American oral history and the broader corpus of slavery narratives. Unlike antebellum slave narratives published within abolitionist networks, this account emerged in the post–Civil War period through a local New Jersey historian, intertwining Black oral testimony with white editorial mediation and linguistic experimentation. Its focus on a Northern-born enslaved woman complicates dominant geographical narratives of slavery as a problem solely of the South, and underscores the persistence of racialized violence outside of plantation settings. Wear to cloth with fraying and loss along the spine, which is partially torn and detached from the text block; minor foxing to the frontispiece; text pages largely clean and internally bright with only light age toning. Overall fair to good only. A significant Reconstruction-era record of a self-emancipated former slave and preservation of 19th century African American vernacular speech.

Item #20353

Price: $8,500.00