ABSTRACT
When U. B. Phillips wrote Life and Labor in the Old South (1929) he argued that slave narratives should not be considered worthy sources for historical inquiry because they were imbued with too much abolitionist editing and rhetoric.1 Taking the lead from antebellum southern apologists of slavery who proclaimed that these texts were little more than gross fabrications, Phillips discouraged his contemporaries from chronicling or drawing on a genre whose authenticity he believed to be questionable. This was the general consensus among scholars until Benjamin A. Botkin, the chief Librarian for the Library of Congress, released the Federal Writers Project (FWP) slave narrative collection in 1944. Botkin’s decision to grant public access to twenty-fi ve hundred oral interviews conducted by former slaves in seventeen states sparked a renewed interest in slave testimonies.2
