One of the most effective persuasive tools for the abolitionist cause proved to be the personal narrations of slaves. These eloquent texts, most famously, The Life of Frederick Douglas: An American Slave, forced white readers to personally identify with the first-person perspectives of slaves, and to acknowledge the humanity of captive individuals. This sense of identification was especially important in rallying support for the movement in the Northern states, where some potentially sympathetic Whites had very little real exposure to Blacks on a daily basis.

This persuasive bias in non-fictional slave narratives makes it in

At the end of his tale, Douglass even stresses the goodness of one of his first mistresses, and blames the institution, not the woman for any corrupt or cruel behavior that she might have engaged in while he was technically her property. But Sejour, without the added political, rhetorical needs of Douglass, creates a narrative that contains no such justification that the institution-the persons who willingly inhabit the intuition of slavery are corrupt as the institution itself. Thus Sejour's personally inspired fiction, ironically, in the view of history may be more truthful than Douglass' persuasively intended personal autobiography.

teresting, from a literary perspective, to compare self-evidently autobiographical narratives, such as Frederick Douglass' Life, which was aimed to persuade White audiences to adopt the cause of abolition, with self-evidently fictional narratives, such as that of Victor Sejour. Sejour's works provide some of the first examples of extant African-American authorship. Sejour's most famous fiction is entitled "La Mulatre," or the mulatto in French. But unlike Douglass' later 1845 autobiography, the fictional "Le Mulatre,'" was published in France in 1837. Sejour's work was aimed at a European, foreign audience, rather than an American audience. The short story's aim was less overtly political and persuasive. Sejour simply wished to use the details of his life to tell a wrenching story of the truth of American slavery to a foreign audience. "Le Mulatre" is not simply significant because it is oldest known work of fiction by an African-American writer, but because of the author's evident desire to tell a entertaining and truthful tale, rather than to provide a witness of truth d

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