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

    By Moses Roper

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    The Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper can be read as an extended autobiographical meditation on the meaning of race in antebellum America. First published in England, the text documents the life of Moses Roper, beginning with his birth in North Carolina and chronicling his travels through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Roper was able to obtain employment on a schooner named The Fox, and in 1834 he made his way to freedom aboard the vessel. Once in Boston, he was quickly recruited as a signatory to the constitution of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), but he sailed to England the next year. Roper's narrative is especially interesting because although it was published after Frederick Douglass's much-heralded 1845 Narrative, Roper actually preceded Douglass in his involvement in AASS as well as in his travel to the United Kingdom. This text is often cited by literary scholars because of its length, its extensive detail, and its unforgiving portrayal of enslaved life in the "land of the free."

    A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available in paperback and e-book formats. Each book contains a short summary and is otherwise unaltered from the original publication. DocSouth Books provide affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUNC at Chapel Hill Library
    Release dateSep 1, 2011
    ISBN9780807869666
    A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery
    Author

    Moses Roper

    Moses Roper was born in 1815 in Caswell County, North Carolina, the son of a white planter (Henry) and his house slave (Nancy). He went on to challenge the racial logic of slavery, and his 1837 autobiography repeatedly sold out, necessitating ten reprintings in the two decades after its publication.

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      Book preview

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

      Published by

      The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library

      CB #3900 Davis Library

      Chapel Hill, NC 27514-8890

      http://library.unc.edu

      Documenting the American South

      http://docsouth.unc.edu

      docsouth@unc.edu

      Distributed by

      The University of North Carolina Press

      116 South Boundary Street

      Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808

      1-800-848-6224

      http://www.uncpress.org

      This book was digitally printed.

      About This Edition

      This edition is made available under the imprint of DocSouth Books, a collaborative endeavor between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library and the University of North Carolina Press. Titles in DocSouth Books are drawn from the Library’s Documenting the American South (DocSouth) digital publishing program, online at docsouth.unc.edu. These print and downloadable e-book editions have been prepared from the DocSouth electronic editions.

      Both DocSouth and DocSouth Books present the transcribed content of historic books as they were originally published. Grammar, punctuation, spelling, and typographical errors are therefore preserved from the original editions. DocSouth Books are not intended to be facsimile editions, however. Details of typography and page layout in the original works have not been preserved in the transcription.

      DocSouth Books editions incorporate two pagination schemas. First, standard page numbers reflecting the pagination of this edition appear at the top of each page for easy reference. Second, page numbers in brackets within the text (e.g., [Page 9]) refer to the pagination of the original publication; online versions of the DocSouth works use this same original pagination. Page numbers shown in tables of contents and book indexes, when present, refer to the original works’ printed page numbers and therefore correspond to the page numbers in brackets.

      Summary

      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. Register—a Marianna, Florida, planter known for his cruel treatment of slaves—Roper 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. Roper’s 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 Roper’s life, including the date and place of his death, remain unknown.

      Extremely popular with abolitionist audiences in both England and America, Moses Roper’s Narrative was published in ten different editions between 1837 and 1856, and was even translated into Celtic. The 1848 edition of Roper’s text—the version summarized here—is the longest version of the Narrative; it includes Roper’s preface as well as an appendix. This appendix features a short note (dated March 1846) updating readers on Roper’s life after slavery, poems written by Roper’s 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 Roper’s Narrative is its frank discussion of how this light skin tone sometimes enables him to pass—to be identified as a white/Native American man rather than an enslaved black man—in order to avoid capture and re-enslavement.

      Roper’s 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). Roper’s success as an author and a lecturer in his own lifetime proves that he succeeded. Today critics see Roper’s 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).

      Works Consulted

      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

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