Samuel Ringgold Ward’s great oratory skills were key to the movement to end slavery in the 1800s.
The famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave Ward credit for being able to capture attention wherever he went. “As an orator and thinker, he was vastly superior, I thought, to any of us, and being perfectly black and of unmixed African descent, the splendors of his intellect went directly to the glory of [the] race,” Douglass said in his autobiography, “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.”
Ward was born in 1817 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to enslaved parents. At a young age, he and his parents fled to rural New Jersey in 1820, and then went to New York in 1826. Despite his parents being in constant fear of recapture, they never told Ward that they were once enslaved. Ward didn’t find out that he was an escaped slave until he became an adult….