Slave Narratives

by William L. Andrews

  WILLIAM WELLS BROWN (1814–November 6, 1884) Born on a plantation near Lexington, Kentucky, the son of George Higgins, a white man, and Elizabeth, an African-American woman. In 1816 his master moved to Missouri, where Brown worked as a house servant, a field hand, a tavern keeper’s assistant, a printer’s helper, an assistant in a medical office, and as a handyman for James Walker, a Missouri slavetrader who traveled along the Mississippi River between St. Louis and the New Orleans slave market. After several failed attempts, he escaped on New Year’s Day, 1834, traveling by night across Ohio from Cincinnati to Cleveland. On his way he met Mr. and Mrs. Wells Brown, a Quaker couple whose kindness he acknowledged by adopting their name when he became a free man. In the summer of 1834 Brown married Elizabeth Schooner in Cleveland and began working as a steamboatman on Lake Erie. Moving to Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1836, Brown helped fugitive slaves escape into Canada and organized a temperance society. In 1840 he visited Haiti and Cuba, and in 1843 he became a lecturer for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, a branch of the Garrisonian American Anti-Slavery Society. Separating from his wife in 1847, Brown moved to Boston with their two daughters. His Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself appeared that year and went through four American and five British printings by 1850. In the summer of 1849 Brown attended an international peace conference in Paris and gave antislavery lectures in England. While in England he wrote Three Tears in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852), the first travel book authored by an African American, and Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853), generally regarded as the first African-American novel. Returning to the United States in 1854 after English friends purchased his manumission, Brown published The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), the first drama by an African American. In 1860 he married Annie Elizabeth Gray of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. During the Civil War he helped recruit black volunteers for the Massachusetts 54th and 55th Regiments; his book The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867) is the first military history of African Americans in the United States. After the Civil War, Brown studied medicine and became a physician in Boston while continuing his involvement with the temperance movement. In 1874 Brown published his most comprehensive work of African-American history, The Rising Son; or, the Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race, biographical sketches of 110 prominent black Americans. His last book, My Southern Home, a reminiscence of his life in slavery combined with a critical assessment of the Reconstruction South, appeared in 1880. Brown died at his home in Chelsea, a suburb of Boston.

  HENRY WALTON BIBB (May 10, 1815–August 1, 1854) Born a slave on a plantation in Shelby County, Kentucky, the son of Milldred Jackson and James Bibb, a Kentucky state senator. Bibb was separated from his mother as a small child and began running away from a succession of masters when he was ten years old. At the age of 18, he fell in love with a slave named Malinda, with whom he had a daughter, Mary Frances. Sold to Malinda’s owner, William Gatewood of Bedford, Kentucky, Bibb successfully escaped from slavery by boat, traveling to Cincinnati on Christmas Day 1837, and on to Detroit. He used his earnings in freedom to return to Kentucky in May 1838 to attempt the rescue of his family, but was captured in Cincinnati and sent to Louisville, Kentucky, to be sold. Bibb escaped, then returned in 1839 to Kentucky, but was captured and eventually sold to a Louisiana cotton planter. After several failed attempts, Bibb successfully escaped in 1841 from a Cherokee owner and made his way to Detroit. He soon began lecturing against slavery and in 1844 campaigned for the Liberty Party ticket in Michigan and Ohio. In 1845 he made his final journey South to reclaim his enslaved family, but after learning that Malinda had become her master’s concubine, Bibb renounced all obligations to her and in June 1848 married Mary E. Miles, a Boston antislavery activist. He published Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself at his own expense in 1849; by 1850 the book was in its third printing. After the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, Bibb and his wife immigrated to Ontario, where on January 1, 1851, Bibb launched The Voice of the Fugitive, the first black newspaper in Canada. With his wife, Bibb also founded a school and a Methodist church and helped other fugitives settle in Ontario. He died in Canada.

  SOJOURNER TRUTH (c. 1797–November 26, 1883) Born Isabella in Hurley, Ulster County, New York, the child of Dutch-speaking slaves named James and Elizabeth. She was separated from her parents around the age of nine. In 1810 she was purchased by John Dumont and began working as a field hand and milkmaid on his farm in New Paltz, New York, where she gave birth to at least five children. When Dumont reneged on his promise to free her, she walked away from the farm with her youngest child and went to live with the neighboring Van Wagenen family, whose name she took. After being emancipated on July 4, 1827, by the New York law that ended slavery in the state, she successfully sued to have her son Peter returned from Alabama, where he had been sent after being illegally sold. In 1829 she moved to New York City, where she worked as a domestic. From 1832 to 1834 she was a member of “the Kingdom of Matthias,” a utopian religious commune; when the commune collapsed, Gilbert Vale used her testimony in writing his expose Fanaticism: Its Source and Influence, Illustrated by the Simple Narrative of Isabella (1835). On June 1, 1843, she renamed herself Sojourner Truth and left New York City to become an itinerant preacher, settling in 1844 in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she met William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and other prominent antislavery and woman’s rights activists. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, written by Olive Gilbert, a white abolitionist to whom Truth had told her story, was published in 1850 and reprinted in 1853 and 1855. Beginning in 1850, Truth became a widely traveled speaker for antislavery and woman’s rights; her remarks at a woman’s rights meeting held in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, have become known as her “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” speech, though it is likely that Truth did not use the phrase. In 1857 she moved from Northampton to Battle Creek, Michigan. During the Civil War Truth campaigned for President Lincoln’s re-election, helped with relief efforts for the freed people, and participated in the desegregation of the streetcars in Washington, D.C. After the war she campaigned for land grants for blacks in the West and supported temperance while continuing to speak for woman’s rights. With the aid of Frances Titus, a white friend, Truth reprinted her Narrative in 1875, supplementing it with her “Book of Life,” which included personal correspondence, newspaper accounts of her activities, and tributes from her friends; this expanded edition of Truth’s biography was reprinted in 1878, 1881, and 1884 as Narrative of Sojourner Truth; a Bondswoman of Olden Time, with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence Drawn from Her “Book of Life.” Truth died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan.

  WILLIAM CRAFT (c. 1824–1900) was born a slave in Macon, Georgia.

  ELLEN SMITH CRAFT (1826–1891) was born in Clinton, Georgia, the daughter of an enslaved woman and her master, Major James Smith. At the age of 11 Ellen was given as a wedding present to a white half-sister who lived in Macon. There she met William Craft, a cabinetmaker’s apprentice. They married in 1846 and escaped from slavery in December 1848, traveling by train, steamboat, and coach from Macon to Philadelphia with Ellen disguised as an invalid white man and William posing as “his” slave valet. The Crafts settled in Boston, where William worked as a cabinetmaker and Ellen as a seamstress, and spoke together at New England meetings of the Garrisonian American Anti-Slavery Society. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 they became fearful of recapture and fled to England, where they toured with William Wells Brown and drew large audiences to their antislavery lectures. From 1851 to 1854 they attended the Ockham School in Surrey, a trade school that also taught academic subjects. Moving to London, they started an import-export business while continuing to appear at antislavery meetings. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, an account of their escape written by William, was published in London in 1860. William went to Dahomey in 1863 in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Ki
ng Gelele to abolish slavery, and he later established a school there. He remained in Africa until 1867 while Ellen worked with the British and Foreign Freedmen’s Aid Society in London and raised their five children. The Crafts returned to Boston in 1869 and then went to Georgia, where they established an industrial school for blacks in 1870. After it was burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, they purchased the Woodville plantation in Bryan County, Georgia, in 1871 and opened a cooperative farm school. William served as a delegate to state and national Republican conventions and lectured widely in the North to raise money for the school, but insufficient funds and the hostility of local whites forced it to close in 1878. Ellen died at Woodville, and William died at his daughter’s home in Charleston, South Carolina.

  HARRIET ANN JACOBS (1813–March 7, 1897) Born in Edenton, North Carolina, the daughter of Elijah Jacobs, a house carpenter, and Deliah Horniblow, a domestic servant, both slaves. After the death of her mother in 1819 she was raised by her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, and her white mistress, Margaret Horniblow, who taught her to read, write, and sew. Upon the death of Margaret Horniblow in 1825 Jacobs was sent to the household of Dr. James Norcom, an Edenton physician. Subjected to repeated sexual advances from Norcom, Jacobs formed a clandestine liaison with Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, an Edenton attorney, and had two children by him, Joseph (b. 1829) and Louisa Matilda (b. 1833). In June 1835 Jacobs went into hiding, hoping that her disappearance would cause Norcom to sell her children to their father. Sawyer purchased Joseph and Louisa Matilda in the summer of 1835 and sent them to live with Molly Horniblow, who had been emancipated in 1828. Shortly afterwards Jacobs hid herself in a crawl space above a storeroom in the Horniblow house, where she remained for seven years until her escape by ship to Philadelphia. She found work in New York as a nursemaid to Imogen, the infant daughter of Mary Stace Willis and Nathaniel Parker Willis, a journalist, editor, and poet, and was reunited with her children. To avoid recapture by Norcom she moved to Boston in 1843, where she supported herself as a seamstress. In 1849 Jacobs joined her brother John S. Jacobs in Rochester, New York, where he had opened an antislavery reading room and book store above the offices of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper North Star. In Rochester she met and began to confide in Amy Post, a white abolitionist and woman’s rights activist who urged Jacobs to write her autobiography. Without Jacobs’ permission, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, the second wife of Nathaniel Parker Willis, purchased her manumission in 1852. Jacobs began writing her autobiography in 1853 while working as a nanny for the Willis family in Cornwall, New York, and in 1860 enlisted Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist writer, to edit the completed manuscript and help find a publisher for it. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself was published pseudonymously in Boston in 1861 with Child listed as the book’s editor; an English printing of the autobiography, The Deeper Wrong, appeared in 1862. From 1862 to 1868 Jacobs engaged in Quaker-sponsored relief work among former slaves in Washington, D.C., Alexandria, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia. She then lived with her daughter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Washington, D.C, where she died.

  JACOB D. GREEN (b. August 24, 1813) was born a slave in Queen Anne’s County, Maryland. During his boyhood he worked as a house servant on a large plantation owned by Judge Charles Earle. When he was 12 years old his mother was sold, and he never saw her again. When his wife and children were sold away from him in 1839, Green made his first escape from slavery. He found employment near Philadelphia and lived quietly as a fugitive until 1842, when he was taken back to Maryland. Sold to a new master, Green was sent to Memphis, Tennessee. He made his second escape in 1846 by stowing away aboard a ship to New York, but was recaptured in Utica, New York, and sold to a third master in Louisville, Kentucky, early in 1847. Green made his final escape in 1848, which took him from Kentucky to Toronto, Canada, where he lived until his immigration to England in 1851. While working as an antislavery lecturer, Green published his 43-page Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, in 1864; according to its title page, 8,000 copies of the Narrative were printed. No record of Green exists after the publication of his Narrative.

  Note on the Texts

  This volume collects ten narratives published between 1772 and 1864 that describe the experiences of persons held as slaves in the British North American colonies and in the United States: Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, As related by Himself (1772); Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789); The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va., as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray, by Thomas R. Gray (1831); Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845); Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847); Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849); Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828, by Olive Gilbert (1850); Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery, by William Craft (1860); Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, by Harriet A. Jacobs (1861); and Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, by Jacob D. Green (1864).

  James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw related his story to a young Englishwoman, as yet unidentified, who later helped arrange for its publication. Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars was published in Bath, England, in December 1772, with William Gye as the printer. At least 12 printings of the Narrative appeared by 1800, including printings in Dublin, New York City, and Rhode Island. The text presented here is that of the first printing.

  Olaudah Equiano first published his Interesting Narrative in London in March 1789 in a two-volume edition supported by 321 subscribers. Between 1789 and 1794 he published eight further editions of the Narrative in London, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Norwich, while an unauthorized edition was printed in New York in 1791 and translations appeared in Dutch (1790), German (1792), and Russian (1794). Equiano made substantive changes in each of the authorized editions, adding prefatory material and footnotes and altering wording in the main text; these changes sometimes resulted in the adoption of a more formal and genteel diction. Beginning with the fifth edition, published in Edinburgh in 1793, a paragraph was added to chapter XII describing Equiano’s activities in 1791 and 1792, and in all editions after the fourth, published in Dublin in 1791, a 63-word passage (from “While we lay . . .” to “. . . was performed,” pp. 230.34–231.1 in this volume) was omitted, possibly as the result of an oversight. The text of the first edition has been chosen for inclusion in this volume because it provides the most immediate version of Equiano’s narrative; significant material added in later editions is presented in the notes.

  Thomas R. Gray, a Virginia attorney, interviewed Nat Turner in prison from November 1 to November 3, 1831. He deposited the title of his pamphlet for copyright in the District of Columbia on November 10, the day before Turner’s execution, and published The Confessions of Nat Turner in Baltimore in late November 1831, using Lucas & Deaver as the printers. The text printed here is that of the first edition.

  Frederick Douglass was described as “now writing out his story” by the abolitionist Wendell Phillips in a letter written on February 24, 1845. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was published in May 1845 “at the Anti-Slavery Office,” 25 Cornhill Street, Boston, the address of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society; by September 1845 it had sold 4,500 copies. Although Douglass made no changes in subsequent American printings of the Narrative, he was involved in 1845 and 1846 in the Irish publication of the work, whose sales helped finance his extended speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland from 1845 to 1847; these printings, as well as an English printing published in 1846, omitted the appendix, in which Douglass parodied a Southern hymn, and contained changes in punct
uation, spelling, and wording made to conform to British usage. The text printed here is that of the 1845 first American printing.

  William Wells Brown completed the manuscript of his narrative in Boston in June 1847. Narrative of William W. Brown was published “at the Anti-Slavery Office,” the headquarters of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at 25 Cornhill Street, Boston, in July 1847. In the revised version of the Narrative published in Boston in 1848, Brown made alterations in the wording of some passages, added a lengthy quotation from John Pierpont’s poem “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star,” and reorganized the text, reducing the number of chapters from 14 to 11. By August 1849 four printings of the Narrative had been published in the United States, amounting to a total of 10,000 copies. By then Brown had gone to Great Britain to deliver antislavery lectures, and in 1849 he arranged for the publication in London of a new edition of his book under the title Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave, Written by Himself. For this edition, Brown added a new final chapter describing the rescue in 1836 of a family of fugitive slaves from slavecatchers in upstate New York, as well as extensive prefatory and supplemental material written by Brown and others. The main body of the text followed that of the 1848 revised version, though in chapter V a long quotation from Charlotte Elizabeth’s poem “The Slave and Her Babe” was replaced by two paragraphs denouncing the slave trade. The text of the 1847 first American printing has been chosen for inclusion in this volume because it provides the most immediate version of Brown’s narrative; some of the changes made in later versions are presented in the notes.