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Graham Russell Gao Hodges, R. J. M. Blackett. Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1248–1249, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae217
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R. J. M. Blackett, the dean of Underground Railroad studies, and, further back, a valued originator of now-called Black Internationalism, has fused these important historiographies in a pathbreaking book on heretofore neglected Black Abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward, Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle. Prominent in American abolitionist circles during the 1840s, Ward left the nation in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, never to return, a fact that Blackett argues has limited his appeal to modern biographers. Nonetheless, Ward remains a hero of the movement, making Blackett’s task even more important.
Blackett faced several daunting tasks to start the book. Ward left behind a hefty autobiography published in 1855 in England. Written rapidly from memory, the book left out much of Ward’s early life and marriage, almost nothing on his impactful service to the Liberty Party in the 1840s and scant information on his pastorship at otherwise white congregations in central New York. The book stops just as Ward migrated from England to Jamaica, where he spent the remainder of his days.
