Embracing an account of his early life, the redemption by purchase of himself and family from slavery, And his banishment from the place of his birth for the crime of wearing a colored skin. PUBLISHED BY HIMSELF. BOSTON: PRINTED FOR THE PUBLISHER: J.G. TORREY, Printer. 1842. Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1842, by LUNSFORD LANE, In the clerk's office of the District Court of Massachusetts....

I have been solicited by very many friends, to give my narrative to the public. Whatever my own judgment might be, I should yield to theirs. In compliance, therefore, with this general request, and in the hope that these pages may produce an impression favorable to my countrymen in bondage; also that I may realize something from the sale of my work towards the support of a numerous family, I have committed this publication to press. It might have been made two or three, or even six times larger,

The small city of Raleigh, North Carolina, it is known, is the capital of the State, situated in the interior, and containing about thirty six hundred inhabitants. [A] Here lived MR. SHERWOOD HAYWOOD, a man of considerable respectability, a planter, and the cashier of a bank. He owned three plantations, at the distances respectively of seventy-five, thirty, and three miles from his residence in Raleigh. He owned in all about two hundred and fifty slaves, among the rest my mother, who was a house