James smith autobiography

Autobiography of James L. Smith, Including, Also, Reminiscences of Slave Life, Recollections of the War, Education of Freedmen, Causes of the Exodus, etc.
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original.
Autobiography of James L. Smith;: Including also, reminiscences of slave life, recollections of the war, education of freedmen, causes of the exodus, etc.

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Funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities
supported the electronic publication of this title.

Text scanned (OCR) by Chris Hill
Images scanned by Chris Hill
Text encoded by Lee Ann Morawski and Natalia Smith
First edition, 2000
ca. 280K
Academic Affairs Library, UNC-CH
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
2000.

Source Description:
(title page) Autobiography of James L. Smith, Including, Also, Reminiscences of Slave Life, Recollections of the War, Education of Freedmen, Causes of the Exodus, Etc.
(cover) Autobiography of James L. Smith
James L. Smith
150 p., ill. 2
Norwich
Press of the Bulletin Company
1881

Call number 326.92 S651A (Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University Libraries)

The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH digitization project, Documenting the American South.
This electronic edition has been created by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR-ed text has been compared against the original d

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Autobiography of James L. Smith . . .

Smith, James L.

Norwich: Press of the Bulletin Company, 1881. First Edition. 7 7/8” x 5¼”. Pebbled cloth over boards, title gilt. Pp. ix, 150 including author frontis and 2 (of 2) plate illustrations. Good: hinges cracked; two quires detached (comprising prelims and title page, and one plate and pp. 99-110); corners bumped; spine tips frayed; spotting to boards and endpapers. Some scattered spotting and thumb-soiling to edges; inked former owner's note to front pastedown and annotations to preface and one page.

This is a rousing book of memoirs by an African American minister, James L. Smith. James Lindsay Smith was born enslaved on a plantation in Northern Neck, Virginia in 1816. He escaped in 1838 – an epic journey with two other slaves by foot, horse and rowing a canoe across the Chesapeake Bay. Smith was aided by abolitionists in Philadelphia and New York, and settled in Springfield, Massachusetts via the Underground Railroad. He worked at a shoe shop, earned a license to preach from the nearby Wilbraham

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James Lindsay Smith

American slave narrative author

James Lindsay Smith (ca. 1816 – ca. 1883) was an American slave narrative author, minister, and shoemaker.^[1]^[2] His memoir Autobiography of James L. Smith (1881) was one of only six slave narratives published in Connecticut.^[3]

Life

Born a slave on a plantation in Northumberland County, Virginia, Smith escaped in 1838, rowing across the Chesapeake Bay with two other fugitives in a canoe. After stops in New Castle, Philadelphia, and New York City and with the aid of abolitionists such as David Ruggles, Smith gained safety in Springfield, Massachusetts, via the Underground Railroad. In Massachusetts, he became a founding member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and attended Wilbraham Academy.^[2]^[4]

In 1842, Smith married Emmeline Minerva Platt and settled in Norwich, Connecticut, where he became a Methodist Episcopal minister and established a successful shoemaking business. His daughters, Louie and Emma, attended Norwich Free Academy and became teac