Source Information
Ancestry.com. Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 1832-62 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2000. Original data: Library of Congress. Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910. [database on-line] Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1999. Hughes, Louis. Thirty Years a Slave. New York: South Side Printing Co., 1897.
About Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 1832-62
Sold at the Richmond slave market in 1844, Louis Hughes was born a slave in Virginia in 1832. This database is a collection of his reminiscences of life before and after the American Civil War. It contains accounts of living in Tennessee, five attempts to escape slavery, settling in Milwaukee, and becoming a nurse. Hughes provides detailed descriptions of such locations as Memphis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. He also describes the complex relationships between slaves and masters. For researchers of African-American ancestors in the early nineteenth century, this database can be informative and revealing.
