260 enslaved people

A slave master named Colonel Oliver Smith permitted him to work odd jobs on the side to eventually buy his freedom. As gratitude, the lumberjack slave took Smith’s last name as his own. After saving frugally for years, Venture Smith earned enough money to buy freedom for his wife and three children.

1729 – 1805) was an African-American farmer and craftsman. Smith was kidnapped when he was six and a half years old in West Africa and was taken to Anomabo on the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) to be sold into slavery. As an adult, he purchased his freedom and that of his family.

Venture Smith was a West African who was captured as a boy and sold into slavery in New England. He eventually purchased his own freedom, the freedom of several other slaves, and in his old age he wrote the earliest autobiography by an African American.

The inhabitants, knowing what conduct they had pursued, and what were their present intentions, improved the favorable opportunity, attacked them, and took enemy, prisoners, flocks and all their effects. I was then taken a second time. All of us were then put into the castle and kept for market.

two sons

At one point around 1760, Venture intervened in a conflict between his wife and Mrs. Stanton. His master retaliated by clubbing him brutally and stealing the money he and Meg had been saving up to purchase their freedom.

Renamed Venture Smith, he was given hard household tasks to perform by his master. As Venture grew older, he began to stand up for himself against the cruelty of his master’s son.

Alexander Falconbridge (c. 1760–1792) was a British surgeon who took part in four voyages in slave ships between 1780 and 1787. In time he became an abolitionist and in 1788 published An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa.

Alexander Falconbridge was a ship’s surgeon from Bristol and a friend of John Newton. He made four crossings to the Americas in a slave ship before quitting the trade on principle.

Once they reached the coast, some captives were taken to slave forts or compounds, where they waited for a slave vessel to arrive. Many of these fortresses still stand on the coasts of Africa, at places like Ilmina and Goree Island, as ruined monuments to the cruel economy of years past.

Middle Passage, the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World.

On the first leg of their three-part journey, often called the Triangular Trade, European ships brought manufactured goods, weapons, even liquor to Africa in exchange for slaves; on the second, they transported African men, women, and children to the Americas to serve as slaves; and on the third leg, they exported to …