"Am I not a man and a brother?" asked one of the earliest anti-slavery woodcuts, depicting a chained African man, kneeling on the ground. However, in the eyes of the American Constitution and the Supreme Court, American Blacks were not men, rather they were private property of their owners. One of the primary aims of the early American abolitionist movement was to persuade ordinary Americans to answer the question posed by the 18th century woodcut with a resounding "yes," that African-Americans were citizens, rather than individuals who were fundamentally different from or inferior to white Americans. .

             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 interesting, 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.