The Introduction sets out the historiographical debates, theoretical approaches and arguments of this study into enslaved people’s emotional lives. Enslaved people’s testimony often includes deeply emotional content, yet slavery historians have been reluctant to utilise emotion as a category of analysis when analysing slavery’s impact. The Introduction outlines how this book brings together methods from the history of emotions, slavery studies, memory studies and oral history to analyse enslaved people’s emotional ideologies, experiences, practices and expressions in the antebellum US South. Applying these methods to a range of testimony by enslaved and formerly enslaved people, the Introduction outlines this book’s key argument: that enslaved people created their own affective value system to refuse, resist and survive the system of slavery.