Born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, on October 17th, 1817 Samuel Ringgold Ward escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for Black freedom, citizenship, and equality. When Samuel was about three years old, his family fled to New Jersey and finally escaped to New York City. While in New York, he attended the African Free School. The school's alumni included some of the leading African-Americans of the antebellum period, including James McCune Smith, Henry Highland Garnet and Alexander Crummell. Ward was of pure African ancestry and whose color was referred to "as black as coal". He was working as a teacher when he met his future wife, Emily Reynolds. They were married in January 1838 and later raised a family.
Ward experienced the full force of American racism when a White mob attacked an anti-slavery meeting he attended in 1834. He resisted, and for that he was arrested and imprisoned. He taught school for a while in Long Island and Newark before moving to Poughkeepsie, New York, where he continued his education. In 1839, he faced another crisis of what he called “the Negro hate.” He and his tutor were working to form a literary society. When invitations were sent out, Ward discovered his name was not included. The tutor thought that his inclusion would wreck any hope of attracting the support of Whites. Ward was so hurt, he started making plans to leave the country with his wife. Friends in the Anti-Slavery Society, however, got wind of his plans, and not wanting to lose such a talent, offered him an agency. Ward accepted and stayed, but this was one of many moments in his life when he felt that he was denied basic human rights.
It was during a lecture tour of upstate New York that a small congregation in South Butler invited Ward to be their minister, Ward was licensed to preach in May 1839 by the New York Congregational Association, he served as pastor to an all-White congregation in South Butler, New York, from 1841 to 1843. The call was both a tribute and the challenge. Parts of the North, if not America, took notice. The call also raised Ward's spirits. It was a hopeful sign, but Ward knew the country's eyes were now on him and his small congregation. A few years later, Ward moved to a larger, also all-White congregation in Cortland, New York. It was during this period that he established himself as one of the leading figures in the struggle against slavery and discrimination in the U.S.
Ward spent the better part of the 1840s immersed in the struggle against slavery and the effort to return the vote to Black New Yorkers. He was employed as a lecturer for the American Antislavery Society, and when the society split in 1840, Ward threw in his lot with the new American and Foreign Antislavery Society, believing that the Constitution and involvement in the political process offered the best means of ending slavery. In 1844 he set out on his first lecture tour to abolition, temperance, and peace societies. He served as a leading agent for the American and Canadian Anti-Slavery Societies, and his rhetorical skills were rated, by many as second only to Frederick Douglass and Charles L. Remond. Douglass said of him, "As an orator and thinker [Ward] was vastly superior to any of us" and that "the splendors of his intellect went directly to the glory of race".
He also became an active labor leader and member of the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party. Ward became one of the few from the latter party that was interested in the abolitionist aspect of preventing further inclusion of slave states into the union. Indeed, at the Liberty Party National Convention in June 1848, Samuel R. Ward was nominated for a state assembly seat in 1848. It was more as a platform speaker, however, than as a preacher that Ward achieved fame in antebellum America. Few who heard his speeches ever forgot them. He spoke against slavery in nearly every Northern state. He had already come to the attention of Lewis Tappan, a leading New York abolitionist. Ward was known by his contemporaries as the "Black Daniel Webster". Other abolitionists both White and Black were well aware of Ward's oratory abilities and commended his brilliant efforts in the abolitionist movement.
From 1845 to 1848 Ward edited the "True American and Religious Examiner" in Cortlandville Township, N.Y. In 1849 he went to Syracuse, N.Y., to edit the "Impartial Citizen", which would become the major organ of the Liberty Party. Ward faced constant reminders of the growing political influence of American slavery. The Supreme Court’s decision in the 1842 Prigg v. Pennsylvania case, which allowed states to forbid authorities from aiding slave catchers but paved the way for stricter federal legislation regarding fugitives from slavery, weighed heavily on him. It coincided with his discovery that he had been born enslaved, a fact his parents had kept from him. Now, no longer a free Black man, as he had thought, but a fugitive, a man, without free papers, in effect, without a country.
Freed Blacks during the Antebellum also faced discrimination in employment, as black laborers were not welcome in most unions. In response, Frederick Douglass and Ward helped organize the American League of Colored Laborers, the first Black American labor union. Assembled on June 13, 1850, in the lecture room of Zion's church in New York City, the League appointed Samuel Ringgold Ward as its first president, Frederick Douglass as its vice-president, and Henry Bibb as its secretary. Although short-lived and stymied by the small number of Black workers in cities at the time, the union's goals included the creation of a fund to give loans to Black entrepreneurs, the creation of a bank that would provide credit and encourage saving, and an industrial fair.
In October 1851 he was active in aiding the escape of William Henry, a principal in the “Jerry Rescue” fugitive slave rescue case. Abolitionists in Syracuse, New York broke into the city’s police station and freed William “Jerry” Henry. Henry had escaped from slavery and had been working as a barrel-maker. Although they succeeded in rescuing him and eventually got him to Canada, the effort came at the price of their own safety. In response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 he fled to Canada, where he lectured widely to improve conditions for formerly enslaved people who had settled there. There he declared himself a British subject. After the rescue, Ward left for Canada as well. Although he didn’t know it at the time, he would never return to the United States. Ward was a firm believer in the need for anti-slavery labors, organizations, and newspapers and was conscious of the need to keep the papers from being censured.
During his two years in Canada, he served as an agent of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, and was appointed to the executive committee late in 1851, assisting the fugitive Black slaves. They had taken residence north of the border. In Canada, he worked with Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first Black woman to edit an publish a newspaper, found the militant "The Provincial Freeman", a fugitive newspaper in 1853. The two were the most outspoken Black voice for the fugitive slaves in Canada. He insisted that African Americans arriving in Canada must speak with one voice in demanding their rights which, he concluded, were as little respected here as in the United States. Yet he was unpopular with many of the escaped slaves, clashing with Henry Bibb of the rival "Voice of the Fugitive", and with the Refugee Home Society, which they helped found in 1851 with Josiah Henson, that had bought land and created separate Black settlements. Bibb felt that these settlements would provide better support systems for the new arrivals, and would also help preserve their identity and culture.
Ward, on the other hand, believed that African Americans should integrate into the local society, instead of being segregated among their community. Although he was regarded as a fair and articulate lecturer, he directed his “belligerent spirit” against the officers of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. They favored immediatism on the slavery issue, but he differed sharply from the William Lloyd Garrisonian abolitionists, who abhorred the federal Constitution and favored secession. He also concluded that only the spread of Christianity and British civilization would lift Africa and Blacks in general from their lowly status. In April 1853, Ward travelled to the British Isles on behalf of the Canadian Antislavery Society to seek funds to help the fugitive slaves then pouring into Canada West. Travelling in these causes took him to almost every county in England, and then on to Scotland, where he was able to raise £1,200.
He had also hoped to capitalize on the commercial success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe was visiting England at this time also. Ward explained that the book and Mrs. Stowe's visit brought much attention to the anti-slavery cause in England in 1853. This was more attention than had been seen since 1832. Ward met Mrs. Stowe and her family. He was invited to stay with them for three weeks. He held temperance, abolitionist and religious meetings across the British Isles and befriended influential reformers, authors, and other formerly enslaved individuals who were travelling Britain at the time.
During his two-year stay, he gave many speeches and published his life story, "Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro" (1855). In "Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro", Ward presents himself as a fugitive and abolitionist, and shows how he pursued Black social mobility through an agenda of middle-class respectability. He also portrays himself as an authentic speaker on American slavery, even though he had no personal memory of his life in enslavement. His book combines individual and collective stories of African Americans’ struggles in a racist White society that denied their abilities and thwarted their aspirations.
Samuel Ringgold Ward relates the devastating effects on free Blacks in the Northern USA of being barred from schools and jobs, and validates them as self-made Americans with hard-won social, intellectual, and professional accomplishments. Ward’s vision of Canada echoes his journalism and other Black transborder autobiographies, by framing it as a place where African Americans found physical safety from (re)enslavement, economic opportunities, a social community, and a new identity. Ward saw racism as a major export of the United States, one that had contaminated race relations in other countries that were supposed to be safe havens for Black people. Many Black people had considered making their home in the United Kingdom, Liberia, or Haiti.
Ward also considered Trinidad at one point, before finally settling on Jamaica. Ward’s interest in the island was partly due to his activism with the free-produce movement, which sought to boycott goods produced by slave labor. His choice of Jamaica had little to do with its proximity to the United States. Ward had long since denounced the country and refused to see himself as American. But he was convinced that Jamaica could offer him what he wanted: stability, a sense of belonging, and equality. In 1855, he was given 50 acres of land in Kingston, Jamaica. His time in Jamaica was not exactly peaceful, either. The island faced smallpox and cholera outbreaks and was in the midst of a drought. He became pastor of a small Baptist church as well as a farmer. In 1860, he moved to St. George Parish and became unsuccessfully involved in a series of unproductive projects. Samuel Ringgold Ward died in 1866, he was in his early fifties.