Sketches Of My Life In The South, Part 1

Sketches of My Life in the South, Part 1 is the first part of a slave narrative by Jacob Stroyer, the formerly enslaved American who lived from 1849 to 1908 and who escaped from slavery on a South Carolina plantation during the Civil War. The first edition of Stroyer’s narrative appeared in 1879 with subsequent expanded editions appearing in 1885 and 1889, when the work reached the form by which it has been generally known.

Stroyer was born into slavery on the plantation of Colonel M R Singleton in South Carolina and spent his childhood and youth working in various capacities on the plantation before escaping during the war and eventually settling in the North after emancipation. He became an African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister and produced his slave narrative across several years of work, with the various expanded editions adding substantial material as Stroyer gathered additional information and worked through the various aspects of his recollections.

The narrative belongs to the substantial body of African American slave narratives that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced. The genre had been established in the antebellum period by writers including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and various others whose narratives became central documents of the abolitionist movement and continued to be read across the post war decades. The post war slave narratives, of which Stroyer’s is one, served the substantial purpose of preserving the actual personal experience of slavery for an American audience that was beginning to forget what the institution had actually been like.

Stroyer’s account focuses substantially on the daily details of life on a South Carolina plantation as he had experienced it. He describes the various forms of plantation work, the relationships among enslaved people and between enslaved people and the white plantation establishment, the various forms of punishment and resistance, the religious life of the enslaved community, and the eventual disruptions that the war brought to the plantation system. The treatment combines specific personal recollection with broader observation about the patterns of plantation life that gives the narrative substantial documentary value.

The book is essential reading for historians of American slavery and of African American post war intellectual life. The slave narrative tradition that Stroyer worked within has been substantially revalued in modern academic scholarship as one of the central American literary genres of the nineteenth century, and Stroyer’s contribution has its place in that broader tradition.