THIRTY YEARS A SLAVE: FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM. THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY AS SEEN ON THE PLANTATION AND IN THE HOME OF THE PLANTER BY LOUIS B. HUGHES

Originally published in Milwaukee in 1897, Hughes’s book is a rare autobiography of a black Milwaukeean. His story, however, does not begin in Wisconsin. Most of the book narrates the story of Hughes’s life as a slave. He recounts the emotional pain of being sold away from his mother at about the age of eleven, astutely observes the interactions between slaves and masters, and graphically tells of the physical brutality heaped on him and his fellow slaves. Historians have mined his memoir for what it tells about plantation life, the organization of work, and the interactions between slaves. What has been explored less often, and which appears below, is his account of his free life in Milwaukee.>> From After Slavery: The Milwaukee Years of Louis B. Hughes, by Michael Stevens, State Historian of Wisconsin & administrator of the Society’s Public History Division. Stevens holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.