Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman: Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West

Austin Steward was twenty-two years a slave and forty years a free man, and this memoir bears the weight of every one of those years. Born into slavery on a Virginia plantation, Steward endured the brutality of the peculiar institution as a child, witnessing its cruelties firsthand while harboring an unquenchable longing for freedom and knowledge. His narrative does not end with emancipation, it begins there. After gaining his freedom, Steward became a leader in the abolitionist movement, building a life in upstate New York and later attempting to establish an independent Black colony in Ontario, Canada. The Wilberforce Colony, of which he was president, ultimately failed, but Steward's account of its struggles and the broader fight against slavery remains a vital document of Black self-determination and resistance. His correspondence with other abolitionists, woven throughout the narrative, reveals a network of activists working to dismantle an institution that had stolen decades of his life. This is not merely a slave narrative, it is the story of a man who refused to let freedom be the end of his fight.