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Article

Brockden, Magadalene Beulah  

Katherine Faull

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
23 September 2021

was born in the small West African nation of Popo in the first half of the eighteenth century. Beulah was captured by slave traders when she was ten years old. At the time of her birth, Popo was one of the very small African principalities on the so-called Slave Coast of West Africa. The exact route she followed to arrive in North America is still unknown, but she was eventually brought to Philadelphia, where she was purchased by Charles Brockden, the deputy master of the rolls of the Province of Pennsylvania, recorder of the deeds in Philadelphia, and one of the trustees of the First Moravian Church in Philadelphia.

From the time of his purchase of Beulah to tend his ailing wife Susannah née Fox Charles Brockden expressed concern for the enslaved teenager s spiritual well being In her memoir one of the earliest written by an African woman in ...

Article

Ferebee, London R.  

Laura Murphy

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

writer, sailor, soldier, teacher, and minister, was one of ten children born in North Carolina to Abel Ferebee, a slave and minister of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church, and Chloe (maiden name unknown), a slave. When London was young his mother was sold, apparently because of her unwillingness to submit to her master and her ability to beat him in a fight. She was sold to a speculator, who offered to sell her to her husband or his master, who had allowed Ferebee to hire himself out to a local farmer so that they both profited from his labor. When she was subsequently bought by one of the two men—it is unclear which—London and two of his siblings were allowed to move with her, though they all remained enslaved.

Once he was old enough to begin laboring London was immediately set to ...

Article

Jea, John  

John Saillant

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Around 1816 he published two books, a Collection of Hymns and his Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings; from the latter is derived virtually all available information on his life. The autobiography, which was undoubtedly embellished in some of its particulars, recounts Jea's birth in Africa, his childhood in colonial New York, the abuses he suffered under slavery, his manumission, his family life, and the travels and religious exercises of his maturity.

Jea reported that after he became restive under slavery around the age of fifteen he was baptized in a Christian church a circumstance that he claimed to use to compel his master to liberate him He told of preaching in North America Europe and the East Indies as well as of marrying three women in succession one Native American one Maltese and one Irish His children all preceded him in death Like many early African American authors Jea ...

Article

Jea, John  

David Dabydeen

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

African preacher who travelled around England and Ireland sermonizing. Jea was born in Old Callabar, Africa, and at the age of 2½ was taken, along with his family, to North America, where they became the slaves of Oliver and Angelika Triebuen. They were ill‐treated and not properly clothed and fed. Working hours were long and intense, as Jea records in his narrative The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher (1815).

The text captures his life as a slave his rebellion against Christian hypocrisy the finding of his faith his travels and the significance of his sermonizing Laden with quotations from the Bible it is itself a piece of Jea s preaching often questioning the virtues and beliefs of his readers Following his discovery of Christianity at the age of 15 when as he writes the Lord was pleased to remove gross darkness superstition ...

Article

McCray, Mary F.  

Carol Parker Terhune

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

slave, minister, and religious activist, was born into slavery in Kentucky as Mary Frances Taylor. Known as “Fannie,” she was the fifth of sixteen children and the reported favorite of her parents, Mary and Jonathan Taylor Jonathan Taylor was the freeborn son of a slave mother and her white master while Fannie s mother Mary was a slave Although Mary and Jonathan were allowed by her owner to marry he spent only part of each week on the plantation where Mary and their children worked as slaves Fannie s family was not a religious family and although she had an understanding and acknowledgement of God she was anything but pious in her youth and took pleasure in dancing When Fannie was fourteen years old her aunt a religious woman challenged her behavior explaining the evils of dancing and its sinful implications This conversation ultimately led ...