Certain editions of the Narrative begin with a preface by William Lloyd Garrison and a letter to Douglass from Wendell Phillips. Garrison, a well-known abolitionist, begins his preface by telling us he met Douglass at an abolitionist convention and that the former slave's speech so impressed the audience that Garrison felt he "never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment." He adds that Patrick Henry, the American patriot and revolutionary famous for his "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, "never made a speech more eloquent in the cause of liberty, than the one we had just listened to [at that convention] from the lips of that hunted fugitive."
Garrison emphasizes that institutionalized oppression can adversely affect anyone—not just slaves. He explains that a white person can be reduced to the intellectual level of an animal—if oppressed to excess—and he offers an anecdote about a white American sailor who, after having been captured and kept as a slave for three years in Africa, "lost all reasoning power." Slavery surely cripples the intellect, he reasons, and thus, the abolitionist movement is indeed fortunate to include Douglass, someone who has lived through the brutality of slavery but still retains the ability for coherent advocacy.
Garrison testifies that Douglass himself wrote his Narrative: "I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements; that nothmg has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination." Garrison vouches that any reader unaffected by Douglass' story must indeed have a heart of stone. He adds that Douglass' experiences as a slave are not unique and that there are certainly slaves in Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana who are even more badly treated than slaves in Maryland.
There are those, Garrison warns, who "are stubbornly incredulous whenever they read or listen to any recital of the cruelties which are inflicted on [slaves]." These people will try "to discredit the shocking tales of slaveholding cruelty which are recorded in this truthful Narrative." Garrison, however, is confident that these skeptics will not be able to find falsehoods in the stories Douglass tells.
He ends his preface by mentioning two matters which Douglass later stresses in the Narrative: (1) slaves have no legal recourse; they cannot appeal to any legal authority for the cruelties inflicted upon them by their masters; (2) those people who favor slavery are not on the side of God and Christianity.
