Abstract
Olaudah Equiano, the progenitor of the genre, originated the motto in 1789, appending for good measure a proud declaration of his aboriginal heritage ("the African"), and in 1845 Frederick Douglass, the greatest of all slave narrators, placed it under the accusatory subtitle ("an American slave") of his incendiary memoir. The phrase bold-faced the central importance of print to the nineteenth-century mind: literacy equals intelligence equals personhood. The mere act of writing rebuked the racism that underpinned "the peculiar institution," the special blend of economics, agriculture, paternalism, and terror that defined slavery as practiced on the plantation system in the Deep South, before the Civil War blasted the institution, if never its ideological residue, out of American history.