Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict

Samuel J. May's memoir is not a comprehensive history but something more intimate and urgent: a fragmentary, impassioned record of one man's conscience in active rebellion against American injustice. Written in 1869, when the Civil War's wounds still bled fresh, May revisits the abolitionist struggle not as distant chronicle but as living moral witness. He writes of William Lloyd Garrison and fellow travelers, of the resistance to integrated schools in New England, of the small and large cruelties that sustained 'the worst system of iniquity the world has ever known.' What elevates these recollections beyond personal nostalgia is May's unflinching conviction that slavery was not merely a political failure but a sin that even 'the mightiest nation' could not commit without ruin. His purpose is explicitly memorial: to ensure the fight for liberty occupies 'a permanent place in the collective conscience' of future generations. These are the words of a man who acted on his beliefs when acting meant real danger, and who feared that memory alone might not be enough to preserve what was won.