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by J. Wofford White (Introduction by), Rev I. E. Lowery (Author)
I have no apology to make, and no excuse to offer for writing this book--"Life on the Old Plantation in Ante-Bellum Days." It is not the result of vanity, neither is it a desire for notoriety, that prompted me to write it. No, my reasons are higher, and my purposes are nobler. My only desire has been to do good. The religious element runs through the entire story. It has been a work of faith and a labor of love to me. I cannot express the pleasure I have had in sitting down, and recalling the incidents of my childhood and youth. In doing so, it has enabled me to live my life over again. I only hope that the reader will experience something of the same pleasure in reading the book that I have had in writing it. The "Brief Sketches of the Author" were written just twenty years ago by the late Rev. J. Wofford White. He was a colored man, and a close friend of mine, and was born and reared in the same neighborhood with myself. These sketches were printed in The Christian Witness, a Boston (Mass.) newspaper, and were clipped and carefully pasted in my scrapbook. I republish them in this connection without changing a single word. I would ask the reader to peruse them carefully, and compare them with Chapter XI, entitled "Little Jimmie, the Mail Boy," and note the similarity of characters. I have written this book because there is no other work in existence just like it. No author, white or colored, so far as I know, has traversed, or attempted to traverse, the literary path which I presume to have trodden in writing this book. We are now about forty-five years away from the last days of slavery and the first days of freedom, and the people who have any personal knowledge of those days are rapidly crossing the mystic river, and entering the land that knows no shadows; and soon, there will not be one left to tell the story. And it is the author's thought that a record of the better life of those days should be left for the good of the future generations of this beautiful southland. Others have written of the evil side of those days, but the author felt it to be his mission to write of the better side.
