Samuel Ringgold Ward: The Nation’s Forgotten Abolitionist

Profiles in history: An ongoing series of lesser known but significant figures who shaped our world

Samuel Ringgold Ward worked for an end to slavery in the United States and Canada. Public Domain

Samuel Ringgold Ward’s great oratory skills were key to the movement to end slavery in the 1800s.

The famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave Ward credit for being able to capture attention wherever he went. “As an orator and thinker, he was vastly superior, I thought, to any of us, and being perfectly black and of unmixed African descent, the splendors of his intellect went directly to the glory of [the] race,” Douglass said in his autobiography, “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.”

Ward was born in 1817 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to enslaved parents. At a young age, he and his parents fled to rural New Jersey in 1820, and then went to New York in 1826. Despite his parents being in constant fear of recapture, they never told Ward that they were once enslaved. Ward didn’t find out that he was an escaped slave until he became an adult.

Frederick Douglas honored fellow abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward for his antislavery oratory. Public Domain

Ward attended the African Free School in New York City, and later became a teacher there. In 1834, Ward would begin to realize the brutality of prejudice. During an anti-slavery meeting in New York City, a group of pro-slavery merchants attacked the participants. Ward was thrown in jail without a trial or an accuser. From that point forth, he would dedicate his efforts to the anti-slavery movement.

Anti-Slavery Movement

After being educated at the African Free School in New York, Ward was ordained as a Congregationalist minister in 1839. That same year, he became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.

In 1841, Ward served as pastor to an all-white congregation in South Butler, New York and later in Cortland, New York. During the 1840s, he joined the Liberty Party, and spoke against slavery in most northern states.

He also became the editor and part owner of two newspapers: the Farmer and Northern Star, and, in Boston, the Impartial Citizen. While in the Liberty Party, he opposed the expansion of slavery in newly acquired U.S. territories. He was also strongly against the domestic slave trade.

Ward fought for the right to vote for 40,000 African American citizens in New York. He would eventually feel threatened by the anti-abolitionist riots in New York. He publicly fought against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which put him in even more danger.

Ward was involved in the famous “Jerry Rescue,” about an escaped slave jailed on suspicious charges. There were strong feelings on both sides of the slavery issue. A slave owner intended to take William “Jerry” Henry back. Ward and others visited Henry in jail on Oct. 1, 1851, shortly before an anti-slavery crowd stormed the jail to free him. Henry was briefly held in secret in New York before being brought to freedom in Canada. Ward then followed Henry to Canada in fear that he could also be arrested as an escaped slave.

While in Canada, he continued his work for the abolitionist movement. He was a key leader in the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, and he was a founding editor of the Provincial Freeman newspaper.

Lithograph of Samuel Ringgold Ward in 1891. The Afro-American Press. Public Domain

Ward soon left to tour England to speak and raise funds for the anti-slavery society. There, he met Charles Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” who was also visiting England. After his successful speeches in England, he wrote “Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, and England” in 1855.

Ward left London in 1855, and retired to Jamaica where he worked as a minister and farmer until his death in 1866.

Douglas honored his fellow abolitionist with this final tribute: “In depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness and general intelligence, Samuel R. Ward has left no successor among the colored men amongst us, and it was a sad day for our cause when he was laid low in the soil of a foreign country.”