In these pages, a woman, a wife and mother, speaks the sorrows and oppressions of which she has been the witness and the victim. It is because her sorrows and her oppressions are those of thousands, who, suffering like her, cannot or dare not speak for themselves, that she thus gives this history to the public.
It is no sensational story, but a plain, unvarnished tale of truth, stranger and sadder than fiction.
Our day has seen a glorious breaking of fetters. The slave-pens of the South have become a nightmare of the past; the auction-block and whipping-post have given place to the church and school-house; and the songs of emancipated millions are heard through our land.
May we not then hope that the hour is come to loose the bonds of a cruel slavery whose chains have cut into the very hearts of thousands of our sisters—a slavery which debases and degrades womanhood, motherhood, and the family?
Let every happy wife and mother who reads these lines give her their sympathy, prayers, and aid to free her sisters from this degrading bondage. Let all the womanhood of the country stand united for them. There is a power in combined enlightened sentiment and sympathy before which every form of injustice and cruelty must finally go down.
May He who came to break every yoke hasten this deliverance!
Harriet Beecher Stowe.