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| Josiah Henson | ||
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Born in 1789 in Charles County, Md., Henson was sold away from his mother to a tavern keeper. He was then sold to Isaac Riley in Maryland's Montgomery County, who frequently sent Henson to the District of Columbia to sell produce. When a "tyrannical, barbarous" man defeated Riley in a fight, he sent Henson to get revenge. In an ambush, Henson's shoulder blades were broken, and he could never again raise his hands above his head. In 1825, Riley sent him to Davies County, Ky., where Henson became a preacher. There, he earned money to try to purchase his freedom, but upon his return to Maryland, Riley rejected his offer of $350. Henson returned to Kentucky and he and his wife and four children escaped on foot to Lake Erie, where a Scottish ship captain took them to Buffalo. From there, they entered Canada. Canada had adopted an antislavery law in 1793. In 1841, Henson and a group of abolitionists bought 200 acres near Dresden, Ontario, and established Dawn settlement, a successful farming and manufacturing community for fugitive slaves. They also founded the British American Institute, Canada's first vocational school for blacks. To support his efforts, Henson lectured in the United States and Britain, where he was received by Queen Victoria. When the Archbishop of Canterbury asked where he had been educated, he replied: "From the University of Adversity." In her Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe said that Henson's 1849 autobiography helped inspire her novel. In May 1858, over a year before his raid on Harpers Ferry, the abolitionist John Brown met with blacks and whites at a church in Dresden started by Henson. Although about half of the former slaves who escaped to Canada eventually returned to the United States, Henson remained in Dresden, where he died in 1883 at the age of 94.
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| Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) | ||
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| Thomas Johnson | ||
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| Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907) | ||
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| John Mercer Langston (1829-1897) | ||
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| Rev. Elijah Lovejoy (1802-1837) | ||
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| Benjamin Lundy (1789-1839) | ||
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| Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) | ||
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For her writings, see:
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| Solomon Northrup | ||
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A free black born in upstate New York in 1808, Northrup took a hazardous job requiring travel to the South. Even though he was carrying papers proving he was a freeman and citizen, he was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841, and sold into slavery in Louisiana. In 1852, Northrup's New York friends received a letter from him and with support from the governor of New York, the secretary of war, and a Supreme Court justice, were able to secure his freedom. He published the narrative of his life, Twelve Years a Slave, in 1855.
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The Abolitionists
An inspiration
for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom, Josiah Henson was a slave
for more than 30 years on a 500-acre Maryland plantation before
escaping to Canada in 1830.
Born into slavery in Edenton, N.C.,
she escaped to Philadelphia in 1834. Her slightly fictionalized
autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published
in 1861, describes the sexual abuse she suffered under slavery.
The
son of a free black and a slave mother, Johnson, following the
Civil War, became a minister in Denver and a missionary in Africa.
His autobiography, Twenty-Eight Years a Slave, was published
in 1909.
The
dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln, Keckley was born into slavery
in Virginia and purchased her freedom in 1855. She published
her autobiography, Thirty Years a Slave, which contains her recollections
of Abraham Lincoln, in 1868.
The
son of a Virginia planter and a slave, Langston was born in Delaware
and raised in Ohio, where he graduated from Oberlin College.
He was elected as a town clerk in 1855, recruited African American
soldiers during the Civil War, served a law professor at Howard
University, and served as U.S. minister to Haiti and a Representative
in Congress.
The
Reverend Elijah Lovejoy was the abolitionist movement's first
martyr. The editor of a religious newspaper in slaveholding St.
Louis, he had his press destroyed after he published an account
of a lynching of an African American and the acquittal of its
perpetrators. He then moved to Alton, Ill., a town across the
Mississippi River from slaveholding St. Louis. Three times, mobs
destroyed his printing presses. When a fourth printing press arrived,
Lovejoy armed himself and guarded the new press at the warehouse.
An anti-abolitionists mob set the warehouse on fire and shot
Lovejoy as he fled the building. Lovejoy's opponents lined the
streets and cheered as the mutilated corpse was dragged through
the town.
Publisher
of one of the earliest antislavery newspapers, The Genius
of Universal Emancipation, Lundy was a Quaker who was born
in New Jersey and later moved to Vermont and then to Illinois.
A delegate
to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, she was
denied the right to take part on the ground that participation
would offend British public opinion. Instead, she and two other
American women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Abby Kelly, were relegated
to seats in a balcony. Eight years later, she and Stanton organized
the first women's rights convention in history at Seneca Falls,
N.Y.