The Editor is conscious that the following Narrative has only its truthfulness to recommend it to favourable consideration. It is nothing more than it purports to be, namely; a plain, unvarnished tale of real Slave-life, conveyed as nearly as possible in the language of the subject of it, and written under his dictation. It would have been easy to fill up the outline of the picture here and there, with dark shadows, and to impart a heightened dramatic colouring to some of the incidents; but he preferred allowing the narrator to speak for himself, and the various events recorded to tell their own tale. He believes few persons will peruse it unmoved; or arise from a perusal of it without feeling an increased abborrence of the inhuman system under which, at this hour, in the United States of America alone, three millions and a half of men, women, and children, are held as "chattels personal," by thirty-seven thousand and fifty-five individuals, many of them professing Ministers of the Gospel, and defenders of "the peculiar institution."

For twenty years in the eighteenth century, Georgia--the last British colony in what became the United States--enjoyed a brief period of free labor, where workers were not enslaved and were paid. The Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia created a "Georgia experiment" of philanthropic enterprise and moral reform for poor white workers, though rebellious settlers were more interested in shaking off the British social system of deference to the upper class. Only a few elites in the colony actually desired the slave system, but those men, backed by expansionist South Carolina planters, used the laborers' demands for high wages as examples of societal unrest. Through a campaign of disinformation in London, they argued for slavery, eventually convincing the Trustees to abandon their experiment. In The Short Life of Free Georgia, Noeleen McIlvenna chronicles the years between 1732 and 1752 and challenges the conventional view that Georgia's colonial purpose was based on unworkable assumptions and utopian ideals. Rather, Georgia largely succeeded in its goals--until self-interested parties convinced England that Georgia had failed, leading to the colony's transformation into a replica of slaveholding South Carolina.