Jacob Stroyer | |
|---|---|
 Frontispiece of My Life in the South | |
| Born | 1849 Eastover, South Carolina |
| Died | February 7, 1908 Salem, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Preacher |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Autobiography |
| Notable works | My Life in the South |
Jacob Stroyer (1849 - February 7, 1908) was an American former slave who became a preacher in Massachusetts. He is best known for his autobiography, My Life in the South.
Stroyer was born on the Kensington Plantation in Eastover, South Carolina in 1849. In the first edition of My Life in the South (1879), Stroyer said he was born in 1846. But in the fourth edition (1898), he corrected his date of birth to 1849, and he also specified that he was thirteen years old in the summer of 1863 when he was assigned to a Confederate work detail on Sullivan's Island and fourteen years old when he was wounded at Ft. Sumter in the summer of 1864.
Stroyer's father, William, was born in Sierra Leone and was captured and brought to America as a youth. The younger Stroyer knew little about his father's family background, other than the names of his paternal grandparents. Stroyer's mother, Chloe, was born in South Carolina where her family had been enslaved for several generations. [1] As a youth, he worked as a hostler.
As a child, Stroyer taught himself to read. After the Civil War, he attended schools in Columbia and Charleston. Stroyer moved to Worcester, Massachusetts in 1870. He attended Worcester Academy for two years. He was licensed as an African Methodist Episcopal minister. In Newport, Rhode Island, he was ordained a deacon. He moved to Salem, Massachusetts to preach.
He first published his autobiography, My Life in the South, in 1879. This was revised three times, with the fourth edition published in 1898. [2]
Jacob Stroyer died in Salem Hospital in Salem on February 7, 1908, of heart disease. His death certificate states that the information used to fill out the "statistical remarks" on the certificate was derived from "Book written by himself." He is buried in Greenlawn Cemetery in Salem. [3]
The slave narrative is a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved Africans, particularly in the Americas. Over six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist; about 150 narratives were published as separate books or pamphlets. In the United States during the Great Depression (1930s), more than 2,300 additional oral histories on life during slavery were collected by writers sponsored and published by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program. Most of the 26 audio-recorded interviews are held by the Library of Congress.
Moncure Daniel Conway was an American abolitionist minister and radical writer. At various times Methodist, Unitarian, and a Freethinker, he descended from patriotic and patrician families of Virginia and Maryland but spent most of the final four decades of his life abroad in England and France, where he wrote biographies of Edmund Randolph, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Paine and his own autobiography. He led freethinkers in London's South Place Chapel, now Conway Hall.
Increase Mather was a New England Puritan clergyman in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and president of Harvard College for twenty years (1681–1701). He was influential in the administration of the colony during a time that coincided with the notorious Salem witch trials.
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an American Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, and soldier. He was active in the American Abolitionism movement during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism. He was a member of the Secret Six who supported John Brown. During the Civil War, he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized black regiment, from 1862 to 1864. Following the war, Higginson devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed people, women and other disfranchised peoples.
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Charles Beecher was an American minister, composer of religious hymns and a prolific author.
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William Henry Singleton gained freedom in North Carolina and served as a sergeant in the United States Colored Troops during the American Civil War. After its end and emancipation, he moved North to New Haven, Connecticut. There he became literate and a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, serving also in Maine and New York.
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