Susanna Ashton is a full Professor with the Department of English at Clemson University. Among other awards, she has been a Fulbright scholar in Ireland and a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, a Mark Twain Fellow for the Mark Twain Society, and held archival fellowships at Emory University and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. For 2021-2022 she is the W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African And African American Research at Harvard University. She has published work on the topic of life writing written by enslaved people as well as works on book history, authorship, libraries, copyright, and the author Charles W. Chesnutt. In 2018 that volume won an award for the best scholarly work on Chesnutt by the Charles W. Chesnutt Society. She is currently at work on a biography of John Andrew Jackson and is a 2021-22 Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Sam Aleckson was the pen name for Samuel Williams, a man born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote a memoir about his life and the world around him during and after his bondage.

‘Susanna Ashton’s fine new edition of Samuel Williams’s pseudonymously published slave narrative Before the War and After the Union begs students of slavery and of broader US history and literature to turn the page in ways both unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable… what emerges more broadly is a rich sense of the complex communities and landscapes surrounding Williams in both slavery and freedom. Ashton repeatedly makes us want to turn the page; she reminds us that the published narrative is only a piece of a much larger life that also demands our consideration… Ashton’s work articulates the details of such processes while still maintaining a bit of the magic and wonder of rediscovering life stories long thought lost.’ Eric Gardner, American Literary History

• Introduction Editorial notes The PeopleBefore the War and After the Union. An Autobiography by Sam Aleckson1 Genealogy2 Childhood 3 The Fickle Maiden 4 The Lover 5 The Hunting Season at Pinetop 6 The Beginning of the End 7 In Town Again 8 A Turkey Stew 9 Tom Bale 10 Silla--The Maid 11 The Appraisement 12 The Big Fire 13 Mr. Ward's Return to Pinetop 14 Roast Possum 15 After De Union 16 In the Land of the Puritans 17 The Town of Springlake 18 Wrong Impressions

Susanna Ashton is a full Professor with the Department of English at Clemson University. Among other awards, she has been a Fulbright scholar in Ireland and a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, a Mark Twain Fellow for the Mark Twain Society, and held archival fellowships at Emory University and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. For 2021-2022 she is the W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African And African American Research at Harvard University. She has published work on the topic of life writing written by enslaved people as well as works on book history, authorship, libraries, copyright, and the author Charles W. Chesnutt. In 2018 that volume won an award for the best scholarly work on Chesnutt by the Charles W. Chesnutt Society. She is currently at work on a biography of John Andrew Jackson and is a 2021-22 Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Sam Aleckson was the pen name for Samuel Williams, a man born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote a memoir about his life and the world around him during and after his bondage.

‘Susanna Ashton’s fine new edition of Samuel Williams’s pseudonymously published slave narrative Before the War and After the Union begs students of slavery and of broader US history and literature to turn the page in ways both unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable… what emerges more broadly is a rich sense of the complex communities and landscapes surrounding Williams in both slavery and freedom. Ashton repeatedly makes us want to turn the page; she reminds us that the published narrative is only a piece of a much larger life that also demands our consideration… Ashton’s work articulates the details of such processes while still maintaining a bit of the magic and wonder of rediscovering life stories long thought lost.’ Eric Gardner, American Literary History

• Introduction Editorial notes The PeopleBefore the War and After the Union. An Autobiography by Sam Aleckson1 Genealogy2 Childhood 3 The Fickle Maiden 4 The Lover 5 The Hunting Season at Pinetop 6 The Beginning of the End 7 In Town Again 8 A Turkey Stew 9 Tom Bale 10 Silla--The Maid 11 The Appraisement 12 The Big Fire 13 Mr. Ward's Return to Pinetop 14 Roast Possum 15 After De Union 16 In the Land of the Puritans 17 The Town of Springlake 18 Wrong Impressions

Susanna Ashton is a full Professor with the Department of English at Clemson University. Among other awards, she has been a Fulbright scholar in Ireland and a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, a Mark Twain Fellow for the Mark Twain Society, and held archival fellowships at Emory University and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. For 2021-2022 she is the W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African And African American Research at Harvard University. She has published work on the topic of life writing written by enslaved people as well as works on book history, authorship, libraries, copyright, and the author Charles W. Chesnutt. In 2018 that volume won an award for the best scholarly work on Chesnutt by the Charles W. Chesnutt Society. She is currently at work on a biography of John Andrew Jackson and is a 2021-22 Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Sam Aleckson was the pen name for Samuel Williams, a man born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote a memoir about his life and the world around him during and after his bondage.

‘Susanna Ashton’s fine new edition of Samuel Williams’s pseudonymously published slave narrative Before the War and After the Union begs students of slavery and of broader US history and literature to turn the page in ways both unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable… what emerges more broadly is a rich sense of the complex communities and landscapes surrounding Williams in both slavery and freedom. Ashton repeatedly makes us want to turn the page; she reminds us that the published narrative is only a piece of a much larger life that also demands our consideration… Ashton’s work articulates the details of such processes while still maintaining a bit of the magic and wonder of rediscovering life stories long thought lost.’ Eric Gardner, American Literary History

• Introduction Editorial notes The PeopleBefore the War and After the Union. An Autobiography by Sam Aleckson1 Genealogy2 Childhood 3 The Fickle Maiden 4 The Lover 5 The Hunting Season at Pinetop 6 The Beginning of the End 7 In Town Again 8 A Turkey Stew 9 Tom Bale 10 Silla--The Maid 11 The Appraisement 12 The Big Fire 13 Mr. Ward's Return to Pinetop 14 Roast Possum 15 After De Union 16 In the Land of the Puritans 17 The Town of Springlake 18 Wrong Impressions