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Samuel Ringgold Ward

1817- 1867

Name: Samuel Ringgold Ward

Birthplace: MD

Status: Fugitive Slave

Occupation/Training: Clergyman, Orator, Emigrationist

Residences: NY, Canada, Jamaica West Indies

Abolitionist Involvement:


In New York, after his escape as a fugitive slave, Ward attended the African Free School, where he was a classmate of Henry Highland Garnet and John McCune Smith. He later became a clergyman.

A member of the Liberty political party in New York, he attended the Buffalo Convention of the party in 1843, where he opened one of the sessions with a prayer, and also delivered a formal address. By 1846, Ward had become vice president of the American Missionary Association, a non-denominational group which was headquartered in NY. This organization denounced the colonization efforts of the white American Colonization Society, but felt that African Americans should help with Christianizing Africa. Membership in the AMA was open to anyone who was not a slaveholder, or who practiced "other sins".

Ward became active in the temperance movement and was the only Black member admitted to the Cortland, NY branch of the Sons of Temperance. When ordered to dismiss him because of his race, the members of the branch stood by him and refused to do so. He also was active in voting rights work in NY.

As disillusionment among many Black abolitionists with the slowness of white abolitionist reform spread, Ward began to espouse militancy and emigrationism. By 1851, he was advising slaves that they were under holy obligation to defy the law, even by force of arms if necessary. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Ward assisted in the rescue of "Jerry", a free man who was picked up as a fugitive in Syracuse, by storming the jail where he was held. Ward claimed to have been one of the men who filed off "Jerry's" shackles.

After this, Ward escaped to Canada where he worked among the fugitive slave settlements, which he considered as stopovers on the way to the place to which they would eventually emigrate. He also visited England to raise funds for the efforts of the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society, and was a very popular speaker there on behalf of the cause. There were often as many as 2,000 attendees at his lectures in England, and Ward is described as having been a witty orator.

In 1855, Ward left England and resettled in Jamaica, where he spent the remainder of his life. It was his hope to lead fugitive slave families in Canada to the land in Jamaica which his English benefactors had given him. Ward believed that a simple boycott of America's slave produced items would not destroy slavery as the foreign abolitionists hoped, and that large-scale developments of fugitive communities could create alternative resources for England whereby they would not have to depend of American goods.



Place of Death: Jamaica West Indies

Publication/References: 'Autobiography' Black Abolitionists, by Benjamin Quarles; Holy Warriors, by James Stewart; There is a River, by Vincent Harding; Building an Antislavery Wall, by R.J.M. Blackett.

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