Moses Roper - A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery

By Moses Roper

A DocSouth Books Edition
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library
Chapel Hill

A DocSouth Books Edition, 2011

ISBN 978-0-8078-6965-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library
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Documenting the American South
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Born in 1815 in Caswell County, North Carolina, Moses Roper was the son of a white planter, Henry H. Roper, and Nancy, his slave. When Roper was about six years old, he was sold away from his family, possibly because of his light skin tone and resemblance to his father. Finally bought by Mr. Registera Marianna, Florida, planter known for his cruel treatment of slavesRoper ran away yet again, beginning what would ultimately be a successful escape. After walking over 350 miles from Marianna to Savannah, Georgia, Roper gained employment as a steward on the Fox, a schooner that sailed North in August 1834. Once there, Roper traveled through New York, Vermont and Massachusetts, working various jobs. During his time in Boston, he met local abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, and became a signatory to the constitution of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In November 1835, he sailed on The Napoleon for Liverpool, England.

Upon arriving in England, where slavery had been abolished a year earlier, Roper connected with prominent British abolitionists, who paid for him to be formally educated and employed him on the anti-slavery lecture circuit. Ropers Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery was first published in London in 1837; a U.S. edition appeared the next year. In 1839, Roper married Ann Stephen Price, an Englishwoman who helped him with his copious anti-slavery work. He eventually purchased a farm in western Canada and moved there with his wife and their child. Most details concerning the rest of Ropers life, including the date and place of his death, remain unknown.

Extremely popular with abolitionist audiences in both England and America, Moses Ropers Narrative was published in ten different editions between 1837 and 1856, and was even translated into Celtic. The 1848 edition of Ropers textthe version summarized hereis the longest version of the Narrative; it includes Ropers preface as well as an appendix. This appendix features a short note (dated March 1846) updating readers on Ropers life after slavery, poems written by Ropers admirers, correspondence from readers of his Narrative, and lists of the towns in England he visited and the denominations of the groups to which he lectured.

One unique feature of Ropers Narrative is its frank discussion of how this light skin tone sometimes enables him to passto be identified as a white/Native American man rather than an enslaved black manin order to avoid capture and re-enslavement.

Ropers Narrative also features unflinching descriptions of the violence he endures in slavery as well. Roper says that his motivation to write his Narrative did not arise from any desire to make [himself] conspicuous, but rather from a desire to expose the cruel system of slavery (p. iii). Ropers success as an author and a lecturer in his own lifetime proves that he succeeded. Today critics see Ropers Narrative as an important early example of the fugitive slave narrative, a genre which, as scholar Kristina Bobo points out, Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown would eventually help make one of the most widely read forms of autobiography in mid-nineteenth-century America (p. 91).

Bobo, Kristina, Moses Roper, in The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature: An Anthology, edited by William L. Andrews, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006; Finseth, Ian Frederick, introduction to A Narrative of the Adventures & Escape of Moses Roper, in North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy & Thomas H. Jones, edited by William L. Andrews, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003; Gross, Izhak, The Abolition of Negro Slavery and British Parliamentary Politics, The Historical Journal, 23.1 (1980): 63-85; Huddle, Mark Andrew, Roper, Moses, in African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 727-729, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; Moses Roper, b. 1815, in The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. I: The British Isles, 1830-1865, edited by C. Peter Ripley, et al., Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Harry Thomas

[Title Page Image]

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free:
They touch our country, and their shackles fall.
Thats noble! and bespeaks a nation proud
And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then,
and let it circulate through every vein.

PHILADELPHIA:
MERRIHEW & GUNN, PRINTERS.
1838.

THE following narrative was to have appeared under the auspices of the Rev. Dr. Morison, of Chelsea, whose generous exertions on behalf of Moses Roper have entitled him to the admiration and gratitude of every philanthropist. But the illness of the doctor having prevented him from reading the manuscript, I have been requested to supply his lack of service. To this request I assent reluctantly, as the narrative would have derived a fuller sanction and wider currency, had circumstances permitted the original purpose to be carried out. Moses Roper was introduced to Dr. Morison by an eminent American abolitionist, in a letter, dated November 9th, 1835, in which honourable testimony is borne to his general character, and the soundness of his religious profession. He has spent about ten days in my house, says Dr. Morisons correspondent; I have watched him attentively, and have no doubt that he is an excellent young man, that he possesses uncommon intelligence, sincere piety, and a strong desire to preach the gospel. He [Page 4] can tell you his own story better than any one else; and I believe that if he should receive an education, he would be able to counteract the false and wicked misrepresentations of American slavery, which are made in your country by our Priests and Levites who visit you.