Henry Clay Bruce reflects on the first Twenty-Nine years of his life spent as a slave, with the modest hope that it will be found to present an impartial and unprejudiced view of that system. His experience taught him that all masters were not cruel, and that all slaves were not maltreated. There were brutal masters and there were mean, trifling lazy slaves. While some masters cruelly whipped, half fed and overworked their slaves, there were many others who provided for their slaves with fatherly care, saw that they were well fed and clothed, and would neither whip them themselves, nor permit others to do so. After years of slaving on the plantation in Missouri and working in tobacco factories, Bruce escaped to freedom in Kansas with his future wife. In the 1880s, he moved to the District of Columbia to take a federal job arranged by his brother, Blanche K. Bruce, a senator from Mississippi. The New Man is unusual in its double for Bruce's life was split by servitude and freedom, and his experience gave heightened meaning to both. Bruce provides insights into the slave's attitudes toward his masters and toward poor white people. He believes that "good blood" (a sense of honour and duty and domestic virtues) will tell, no matter the race, but he appeals to fairness in assessing the situation of emancipated slaves at the end of the Civil "They were set free without a dollar, without a foot of land, and without the wherewithal to get the next meal even, and this too by a great Christian Nation". Henry Clay Bruce was born to black slaves in 1836 and took the name of his master, a farmer in Prince Edward County, Virginia.