You can find Frederick Douglass' books for free online, including his autobiographies. Of particular relevance would be Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

I'd encourage you to look at Middle Eastern slavery, which gets really unjustly ignored in history. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean is one of the most thoughtful, human, and really just very respectful works on Ottoman slavery I've ever had chance to encounter.

I'd recommend Walter Johnson's "Soul by Soul" (Belknap: 2001). Hugely influential look at slave experiences in New Orleans and the capitalist foundation that enabled and benefited from the slave trade.

You could check out Joesph Miller's The Problem of Slavery as History which is an interesting take on slavery as a strategy throughout history and not terribly long. The book has some problems, but that's not bad if you are doing a scholarly critique. As /u/bakere05 says, Soul by Soul is simply fantastic and most of Walter Johnson's work is really good. Eugene Genovese's From Rebellion to Revolution looks at slavery in the western hemisphere as a whole during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. His work is a little dated now, but totally worth the read. I mean, I can list tons of books about slavery in the western hemisphere, but if you wanna go for a broader view, the Miller's book may be best for you.

Unfree labor: American slavery and Russian serfdom by Peter Kolchin is a very good comparative history.

I forget the author but The Arabs As Slave Masters. Very disturbing but not too long a read. Correction; The Arabs As Master Slavers, 1981, by John Laffin

Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom is a great book. It explores how "the rise of liberty and equality in America had been accompanied by the rise of slavery." In the colony of Virginia, Morgan argues, one could not exist without the other.

Alternatively, Peter Wood's Black Majority looks at slavery in the context of colonial South Carolina, where blacks outnumbered whites by 1708.

The Lost German Slave Girl by John Bailey was a fascinating read. It takes place in 1840s New Orleans and involves a court case about this slave's legal status.

It is non-fiction but reads like a novel. It also cites many Supreme Court decisions relevant to the time that were also of particular interest.

I'll offer up Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), not because it's a persuasive argument, but if you're looking to write an analysis, it has a clear and controversial assessment of American slavery. Absolutely nobody accepts his plantation-as-concentration camp analogy anymore, but it is nevertheless a key text in American slavery historiography. Excellent book for a response piece. My recollection is that it's not terribly long, either.

I'll add in: "The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave" by Mary Prince. It's short and it's rich.

She was born in the West Indies, moves around a bit, eventually ends up in England where she runs away from her master. So nothing about American slavery in here, but you get a good idea of what kinds of jobs slaves did in the Caribbean (not all sugar field work) and how they were treated. Though certainly the book was published by an abolitionist society, so it is part propaganda.

Steven Epstein's Speaking of Slavery is a very thoughtful book about medieval italian slavery, a topic that has been whisked under the rug in many cases.

David Brion Davis' The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution is quite good.

Kaffir Boy was powerful i thought, an autobiographical story of apartheid in south africa.

Do realize kaffir is the Afrikaans equivalent to nigger in english. just so you know.

Hmm ...

• Robert Harms, The Diligent (2002) 408pp. Hands down one of the best and most accessible books written on slavery. Follows a slaving voyage through the journal of a crewman. It's a riveting read and well worth taking time on, but it's got a clear organization that will help you skim if you need to crank out a quick response paper.

• Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (2007) 207pp. She looks at records of the [English] Royal African Company, and while she uses statistics as the dry bones of her account, she uses the company correspondence to really flesh things out. A superb study on the commodification of human beings. A fairly quick read with good signposting.

• David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery (2000), 283pp. Eltis asks how the English could develop systems of African slavery at the same time that they were developing notions of personal rights, and he considers African involvement and resistance as well. Resonates well with Smallwood's later study, but gives greater attention to the impacts of slavery on Europe.

• Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (2011), 510pp. Long, but this is a seminal study about just how pervasive slavery was in the late Roman world: 5 million people, or 10% of the population! The good news is that it's not widely read yet, so your prof will probably be happy just to learn something about it, and you might get by with reading the intros to each of the three parts and glancing at his tables. His methods and conclusions are evident. The bad news is that it turns a bit of a blind eye to the Middle East, so some of the conclusions about the collapse of slavery might just be because Harper wasn't as thorough with Arabic or Syriac documents that might show its continuity, i.e. the continuity or collapse of late Roman slavery might still be open to debate.

• Youval Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (2009) ~300pp. This is a translation of an early work in French, Les esclaves et l’esclavage. The introduction is one of the most brilliant reviews of the historiography of slavery that I've ever read. That said, it's still sitting on my shelf waiting for me to finish it ...

Good luck!

If you want a completely different look at slavery, there is a very cool book called Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas by Alvin O. Thompson. It deals primarily with South America and the Caribbean and gives a cool perspective on open slave resistance

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself" is an interesting read.

"Social Conflict in the Roman Republic" by P. A. Brunt has a good section on slavery and the servile wars. Beware though, in that it is pretty Marxist in outlook it is quite out of date. Very short and pithy though.