Born into slavery on a Maryland farm, Josiah Henson (1789-1883) worked as a foreman, married, and became a preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Faced with the prospect of separation from his family, Henson fled with his wife and children to Ontario, where he became a leader in the Afro-Canadian community. This book first appeared in 1849 and avid readers included Harriet Beecher Stowe, who later acknowledged its influence on her own masterwork, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Henson's narrative recounts the circumstances of his bondage, his conversion to Christianity, and the fruitless attempts to buy his freedom. Risking starvation, exposure, and recapture, the Henson family walked from Kentucky to Ohio. Native Americans assisted the struggling family, as did sympathetic boatmen who ferried them across Lake Erie. His memoirs helped alert his contemporaries to the horrors and heartbreak of slavery, and they offer modern readers an authentic account of one family's triumph over injustice and inhumanity.
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