WARNING FOR DISTURBING LANGUAGE AND CONTENT. Fanny Kemble was a leading actor on the 19th century English stage. In the 1830s she met and married a wealthy Philadelphian, part of whose fortune came from his family's cotton and rice plantation on the Sea Islands of Georgia. Kemble, exposed to Quaker ideas, became concerned about her husband's plantation, and he thought she'd change her mind if she saw what it was like. Kemble spent several months living on the estate where more than 600 enslaved people lived and worked. Profoundly shocked, she recorded her observations in journals written as though letters to a friend. Her husband threatened to deny access to their children if she shared the journals. They were published in 1863 after she had divorced her husband and returned to England and the US Civil War was raging. She did not consider herself an abolitionist in the sense of believing enslaved people had a right to freedom, but rather argued that slavery was such a horrible system it could not survive. She argued strenuously against those who justified slavery with happy images. She destroyed arguments of Southern honour, of slaves loving their masters, and other pro-slavery arguments of her day. Includes foreword by John Anthony Scott, an introduction which gives hitorical and biographical background, Kemble's letter to the editor of the London Times, and her letter to Charles Grenville. Not reprinted after the US Civil War until 1961, in time to confront the hardened racist enemies of the civil rights movement. Brown Thrasher Books. The University of Georgia Press. 1984. Paper. USED. $7.00