Samuel Ringgold Ward was born in the State of Maryland about the year 1817. His parents fled from slavery to Isew York, earning Samuel, in his infancy. His early education was received in connection with the African Free School, of that city, which was then taught by a gentleman of Scotch descent, Mr. C. C. Andrew. General Lafayette, on September 10, 1824, paid this school a visit, and placing his hands on the heads of all the boys present, gave them a hearty '''God Bless You." Ward took early to public speaking, and very soon became a lecturer of the anti-Slavery cause. During a stay in England he put forth, in book form, "The Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro", which embraced not only the facts about his own life, but an exact statement of the slave question in America. It was among the very ablest expositions of the relation of the races in this country.

High quality reprint of Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His anti-slavery labours in the United States, Canada, and England. by Samuel Ringgold Ward.

Samuel Ringgold Ward ... was born to slave parents in Maryland in 1817. He and his family fled to freedom in the north ... Ward became affliated with various antislavery societies ... while actively aiding fugitive slaves ... In 1853 he went to Great Britain to lecture ... In London English abolitionists urged him to write 'The autobiography of a fugitive Negro'.

This five-volume documentary collection--culled from an international archival search that turned up over 14,000 letters, speeches, pamphlets, essays, and newspaper editorials--reveals how black abolitionists represented the core of the antislavery movement. While the first two volumes consider black abolitionists in the British Isles and Canada (the home of some 60,000 black Americans on the eve of the Civil War), the remaining volumes examine the activities and opinions of black abolitionists in the United States from 1830 until the end of the Civil War. In particular, these volumes focus on their reactions to African colonization and the idea of gradual emancipation, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the promise brought by emancipation during the war.

North Star Country is the story of the remarkable transformation of Upstate New York's famous 'Burned over District;' where the flames of religious revival sparked an abolitionist movement that eventually burst into the conflagration of the Civil War. Milton C. Sernett details the regional presence of African Americans from the pre-Revolutionary War era through the Civil War, both as champions of liberty and as beneficiaries of a humanitarian spirit generated from evangelical impulses. He includes in his narrative the struggles of great abolitionists—among them Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, Beriah Green, Jermain Loguen, and Samuel May—and of many lesser-known characters who rescued fugitives from slave hunters, maintained safe houses along the Underground Railroad, and otherwise furthered the cause of freedom both regionally and in the nation as a whole. Sernett concludes with a compelling examination of the moral choices made during the Civil War by upstate New Yorkers—both black and white—and of the post-Appomattox campaign to secure freedom for the newly emancipated.