The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N. C

The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N. C. is an 1842 slave narrative by Lunsford Lane (1803-1879), the African American writer and antislavery lecturer who purchased his own freedom and then the freedom of his wife and seven children before being driven out of North Carolina by a mob hostile to his abolitionist contacts. Lane was born enslaved in Raleigh and built a tobacco and pipe business in the city that earned the money to buy his family. After his expulsion he settled in Massachusetts and travelled the Northern lecture circuit speaking against slavery. The Narrative was first published in Boston in 1842 and went through several editions in the next two decades. It is a primary source for the slave narrative tradition that runs from Olaudah Equiano through Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and for the American abolitionist movement. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.