Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days: Autobiography of a Former Slave Woman

Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days is an autobiographical account of Annie L. Burton, African-American memoirist from Alabama. Burton was born into slavery on a plantation near Clayton, and was liberated in childhood by the Union Army. Her father was a white man from Liverpool, England, who owned a nearby plantation and died in Alabama, in 1875. Moving North in 1879, she was among the earliest Black emigrants there from the South during the post-Civil War era, supporting herself in Boston and New York by working as a laundress and as a cook. In her autobiography, published in 1909, Burton relates that the end of slavery not only signaled a time for African Americans to start a new life, but also a time to redefine their lives.