Autobiography of a Female Slave

by Mattie Griffith

with an afterword by Joe Lockard

Mattie Griffith, passing as a black, wanted her book to horrify and shame the nation. She posed as a slave to bring attention to the injustice of slavery. Identifying herself as Ann, a former servant woman, she recalls her protected youth and good education as a nearly white child. She tells that at twelve she was sold to a brutal master. On his Kentucky plantation she witnessed and experienced the cruelty of slave life. Following his death one of his daughters takes Ann to the city as her servant. Ann finds new friendships there and falls in love with Henry, a slave who kills himself after being cheated out of his self-purchase. After being sold to an elderly Bostonian who emancipates her, Ann finishes her story as a schoolteacher for black children. Pseudo-slave narratives like Griffith's, first published in 1856, appeared over the course of the abolitionist movement. This is the only one now in print.

Mattie Griffith (c.1826-1906), born in Kentucky, disappeared from American literary history. She remained a lifelong activist, first for abolition, and then for women's suffrage and for temperance.

Joe Lockard is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley.