A Free Man
Smith moved to Long Island. In 1769, after cutting wood and living frugally for four years, Smith purchased his sons, Solomon and Cuff. He then purchased a black slave for sixty pounds, but the man ran away without repaying him.
Venture Smith suffered his first tragedy as a freedman when Solomon died from scurvy on a whaling expedition in 1773. That same year, Smith purchased his pregnant wife Meg from Thomas Stanton. When the child was born, he was named Solomon, in memory of his deceased brother. With the purchase of his daughter Hannah in 1775, Venture Smith had freed his entire family.
Venture Smith spent the remainder of his life in Haddam Neck, Connecticut, on a farm that he bought in 1776. He made a living by fishing, whaling, farming his land, and trading on the Salmon River, located near his residence.
In 1798, Smith relayed his life experiences to Connecticut schoolteacher and Revolutionary War veteran Elisha Niles, who published it. The narrative is the subject of some contention, regarded in many instances as "whitewashed" and inauthentic. It was suspected that the white editor manipulated Smith's story, a common practice among editors of slave narratives.
Venture Smith died in 1805.
Smith (or his editor) claimed that he was well over 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, weighed 300 pounds (140 kg), and carried a 9-pound (4.1 kg) axe for felling trees. From these and other elements of his life, Smith became known as the black Paul Bunyan.
Read more about this topic: Venture Smith
Famous quotes containing the words free and/or man:
“We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons.... If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear’s work, that is its affair.... We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.”
—Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)