Slavery in the United States : a narrative of the life and adventures of Charles Ball, a black man, who lived forty years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a slave, under various masters, and was one year in the Navy with Commodore Barney, during the late war : containing an account of the manners and usages of the planters and slaveholders of the south, a description of the condition and treatment of the slaves, with observations upon the state of morals amongst the cotton planters, and the perils and sufferings of a fugitive slave, who twice escaped from the cotton country.

The first edition of "an autobiography, a family history, and a record of the inhumanity of hereditary chattel slavery" (bookseller's description).