Isaiah ii – Google

Amazing book! All who are students of American history must read it. Google has this book listed as fiction but if you read it, Mrs. Rush says that all she writes are first hand accounts. She changes names and places to protect identities because she goes into a lot of detail about personal accounts. Mrs. Rush was a Christian women who served the poor in her community. She was raised in a strong abolitionist family and had believed all the horror she had heard about Southern slavery. At 18 she went to the South and stayed 3 years to see the institution firsthand, though she admitted she was scared to do it because the thought of seeing the horror first hand shook her to the core, but she decided she had to go and witness things for herself. This book actually focuses more on how things were for the poor around Philadelphia whom she served and had direct experience with. She visited the widow and orphan, feed and clothed the hungry and sick. This book tells of her first hand account of life in the North and the South, as she personally experienced it. It's a heart wrenching book about the hypocrisy of man, and those who refuse to remove the beam from their own eye while continually seeking to remove the splinter from their brothers. A must read, but be prepared to cry.

Propaganda. Sure, it's a collection of horrors which took place under slavery in the South by wicked masters, but these collections of stories were the exception, not the rule. Many northern men beat their wives to death, killed their children, abused their poor labourers -- sometimes even killing them (things which were unheard of in the South), but this didn't prove the institution of marriage, parenting, and employer were inherently evil. This is the case Mrs. Stowe attempts to make with this book. She knew she lied in her work of fiction "Uncle Tom's Cabin", so she released this book later to try and justify her lies. To find a few hundred cases of abuse amongst the millions of slaves that existed in the South is not a great task and only proves that evil men exist -- which all already know. Mrs. Stowe was a propagandist and accuser, and she had never travelled to the South to see how it was first hand; as most northerners never did.