A Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis (Illustrated Edition)

Slavery existed long before the United States of America was founded, but so did opposition to slavery. Both flourished after the founding of the country, and the anti-slavery movement was known as abolition. For many abolitionists, slavery was the preeminent moral issue of the day, and their opposition to slavery was rooted in deeply held religious beliefs. Quakers formed a significant part of the abolitionist movement in colonial times, as did certain Founding Fathers like Benjamin Franklin. Many other prominent opponents of slavery based their opposition in Enlightenment ideals and natural law. Noah Davis (March 1804April 7, 1867) was born into slavery in Virginia. He purchased his own freedom for 500. Davis purchased freedom for his wife and their two youngest children in 1851, and several years later for another daughter and son who were in danger of being sold. When their other three enslaved children faced the auction block in 1858, Davis again toured the North to raise money and succeeded in freeing his daughter. Hoping to earn enough money to free his two sons and to provide funds for his struggling church, he published his memoirs, A Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis, a Colored Man (1859). In the Narrative, Davis described his life in slavery, his religious conversion, his efforts to secure his family's freedom, and his work as a minister. Davis's health soon began to fail, possibly as a consequence of having worked tirelessly for almost fifteen years to raise more than 4,000 to rescue most of his family from slavery. This edition of A Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis, A Colored Man Written by Himself, At the Age of Fifty-Four. is specially formatted with a Table of Contents and pictures of famous abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and more.