The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life. Including Previously Uncollected Letters by Jennifer A. Williamson

Reviewed by: The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life. Including Previously Uncollected Letters by Jennifer A. Williamson John Saillant The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life. Including Previously Uncollected Letters. By Jennifer A. Williamson. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016, 337 pages, $39.95 Paper. Jermain Wesley Loguen lived a remarkable life. Born Jarm, a slave, in Tennessee around 1814, he escaped to the North and settled in mid-state New York, although he crossed the border into Canada several times. He began reading and writing, then he preached in a number of different churches. He is now associated with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church although his religious interests were wide ranging and his affiliation to the A.M.E.Z. Church developed late in his life. He was an energetic abolitionist speaker as well as an incisive commentator on American religion. In a published exchange with his former mistress, he denied the justice of enslavement and he refused to buy his own freedom. His free energies were focused on mid-state New York. He facilitated the Underground Railroad in countless ways, and he participated in the famous 1851 "Jerry rescue" in Syracuse, in which a number of residents, black and white, defied the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and battled officials holding the runaway William "Jerry" McHenry. Like Frederick Douglass, he recruited young black men for service in the Civil War. After the War, in the last few years of his life, he traveled between Pennsylvania and New York and he sought to establish A.M.E.Z. congregations in Kentucky and Tennessee. Like Jeremiah Sanderson, he turned his attention to black life in the western United States. But he died, in 1872, in Saratoga Springs, before he could go west. His 1859 memoir is the story of his life from childhood to the repercussions of the Jerry rescue. Loguen was indicted but never tried for his role in the rescue. His memoir plays an important role in scholarship on the rhetoric and artistry of black abolitionist writing ("novelization" studies), and it should function as a model text for black voices in state history in education. This new edition contains an appendix with a selection of Loguen's correspondence. For readers of the early twenty-first century, the parts of The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman, that are most likely to be of interest [End Page 302] are his novelistic account of running away and his detailed immersion in abolitionist life in New York. As a runaway, abolitionist, and Underground Railroad conductor, he set foot in Rochester, Utica, Whitesboro, Bath, Ithaca, Cortland, Troy, and Syracuse. These were important places at important moments in New York history. When New York history is taught in schools or colleges, it is crucial that students encounter black voices in local contexts. And when teachers and researchers educated in New York institutions relocate, as they sometimes do, to other states, it is crucial that they transfer this insight—that black-authored texts are a crucial part of state history—to their new environments. Once we have models of black voices at local levels, we find them all around us. In other words, "state history" should be a transferable skill in the American educational landscape. With authors like Loguen, we sharpen the skills we need to transfer, in the case at hand, from New York to other states. Williamson's "critical introduction" offers an engaging approach to the 1859 memoir. She notes his connection with Frederick Douglass, both in abolitionist activism and in the rhetoric of manliness. She enters the debate over whether it was Loguen or a white abolitionist who wrote the memoir. That debate intersects with commentary on authenticity. Using contextual evidence, Williamson concludes that Loguen was the author even if he hired a white abolitionist associate to edit the manuscript. Unfortunately, the handwritten manuscript does not, as far as we know, exist. Williamson also situates Loguen's memoir in the process of abolitionist-minded "novelization," the way in which nineteenth-century black-authored autobiographies borrowed from the...

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