Summary: An American Slave By Henry Bibb

Henry Bibb was an American slave throughout most of his life. Like most slaves, Bibb was severely unhappy with his masters and tried to get away from them nonstop but running away. In his autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave, Bibb is successful in trying to convince his readers to think of slavery as unjust and wrong through means of showing the cruelty of slave owners and the horrible treatment slaves went through. In his autobiography, Henry Bibb goes into detail about the cruel way most slaveowners handled their slaves. For example, one of Bibbs first masters, Mr. Vires, had a wife that Bibb called a “tyrant”. Bibb goes on to explain that “she kept me almost half of my time in the woods, running from under the bloody lash”. Once Bibb marries, by common law, a pretty slave girl, Malinda, he goes into more detail about the treatment of slaves. After Bibb was sold to Wm. Gatewood, the slaveowner of Malinda, he soon sees what cruel things …show more content…
We might think that slavery is horrendous, but it was just something that happened everyday in the 19th century. The people thought that only some slave owners were cruel to their slaves. They thought that the slaves were over exaggerating about the treatment they received. When Bibb published this book, he gave the people an insight to the world of a slave. The brutal beatings and harsh conditions were piled on left and right. On top of this, slaves were denied basic human rights like the practice of their religion. This autobiography was an effective anti slavery source because it showed the people the truth. It showed that those slaves were exaggerating. It showed that not only male slaves were beat, but also women and children. Henry Bibb helped change opinions about the antislavery movement all from telling the truth in his autobiography about his life and adventures of being an American