Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky

Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky PDF

Author: C. L. Innes

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2010-11

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9780807138052

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In 1854, faced with the threat of yet another brutal beating, a fifty-year-old slave in Mason County, Kentucky, decided to try again to escape. His first attempt had ended in his near starvation as he hid for nine weeks in a swamp, before hunger compelled him to return to his master. This time the slave sought the help of a neighbor with abolitionist sympathies, and he joined the hundreds of other fugitive slaves fleeing across the Ohio River and north to Canada on the Underground Railroad. After his arrival in Toronto he discarded his master's surname (Parker), renamed himself Francis Fedric, and married an Englishwoman. In 1857, he traveled with his wife to Great Britain, where he lectured on behalf of the antislavery cause and published two versions of his life story. Born in Virginia circa 1805, Francis Fedric was not unlike thousands of other African Americans who escaped slavery in the southern states and sought refuge in Britain. Many of his fellow ex-slaves also joined the abolitionist lecture circuit and published memoirs to support both the cause and themselves. Addressed to a British audience, these memoirs constitute a distinctive subgenre of the slave narrative, and an essential continuation of the narrative tradition established in England by Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, and Mary Prince. The first of Fedric's two memoirs, Life and Sufferings of Francis Fedric, While in Slavery: An Escaped Slave after 51 Years in Bondage (1859), offers a brief but vivid and dramatic twelve-page description of his escape. Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky; or, Fifty Years of Slavery in the Southern States of America (1863) provides a much more detailed account of life as a slave and of plantation culture in the southern states. Together the two works present a mesmerizing and distinct perspective on slavery in the South. Amazingly, these narratives, among the most interesting of the genre, remained out of print for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Collected here for the first time and meticulously edited by C. L. Innes, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky: A Narrative by Francis Fedric, Escaped Slave includes a contextual introduction, substantial biographical information on Fedric, and extensive annotations that situate and illuminate his work. Long forgotten and never before published in the United States, Fedric's narratives are certain to take their rightful place alongside the most recognizable accounts in the canon of slave memoirs.

Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery

Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery PDF

Author: Henry Goings

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2012-03-05

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0813932408

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Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery tells of an extraordinary life in and out of slavery in the United States and Canada. Born Elijah Turner in the Virginia Tidewater, circa 1810, the author eventually procured freedom papers from a man he resembled and took the man’s name, Henry Goings. His life story takes us on an epic journey, traveling from his Virginia birthplace through the cotton kingdom of the Lower South, and upon his escape from slavery, through Tennessee and Kentucky, then on to the Great Lakes region of the North and to Canada. His Rambles show that slaves were found not only in fields but also on the nation’s roads and rivers, perpetually in motion in massive coffles or as solitary runaways. A freedom narrative as well as a slave narrative, this compact yet detailed book illustrates many important developments in antebellum America, such as the large-scale forced migration of enslaved people from long-established slave societies in the eastern United States to new settlements on the cotton frontier, the political-economic processes that framed that migration, and the accompanying human anguish. Goings’s life and reflections serve as important primary documents of African American life and of American national expansion, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This edition features an informative and insightful introduction by Calvin Schermerhorn.

Autobiography of Rev. Francis Frederick of Virginia

Autobiography of Rev. Francis Frederick of Virginia PDF

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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Born in slavery in Fauquier County in Virginia, Francis Frederick spent the first twelve years of his life in Virginia, then his master moved to Kentucky. This account provides some details of plantation life in Kentucky, treatment of slaves, a slave wedding, Frederick's conversion to Christianity, escape on the underground railroad to Canada at the age of forty-six, learning to read, trip to Europe and places visited there, and his return to the United States to work with members of his race to educate them about God and help to improve their lives.

Autobiography of REV. Francis Frederick, of Virginia (Dodo Press)

Autobiography of REV. Francis Frederick, of Virginia (Dodo Press) PDF

Author: Rev Francis Frederick

Publisher:

Published: 2009-11

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13: 9781409981251

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Rev. Francis Frederick was an African American slave born in Fauquier County, Virginia, "about the year 1809." He escaped to Canada and then to England. He returned to America after the end of the Civil War and was employed by the New York American Association as a colporter in Baltimore. His narrative, Autobiography of Rev. Francis Frederick, of Virginia, was published in 1869.

The Negro in Virginia

The Negro in Virginia PDF

Author:

Publisher: Blair

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780895871190

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Slavery is as basic a part of Virginia history as George Washington, who was accompanied at Valley Forge and Yorktown by his slave William Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, who directed his slaves to cut 30 feet off a mountaintop for the site of Monticello. Slavery in the Old Dominion began in 1619, when a Spanish frigate was captured and its cargo of Negroes brought to Jamestown. Virginia Negroes experienced slavery as field laborers, as skilled craftsmen, as house servants. In 1935, the Virginia Writers' Project began collecting data for a history of Negroes in the Old Dominion through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Depression. Published in 1940 as "The Negro in Virginia", it was regarded as a "classic of its kind." Modern readers will be surprised at how relevant it remains today. -- From publisher's description.