Looking back over his many years in the trenches, fighting against the twin evils of slavery and discrimination, Frederick Douglass remembered a Free Soil Party meeting he attended in Buffalo, New York, with Samuel Ringgold Ward and some other African American activists and abolitionists. Ward, he recalled, attracted attention wherever he appeared:
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. In depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness and general intelligence, Samuel R. Ward has left no successor among the colored men amongst us, and it was a sad day for our cause when he was laid low in the soil of a foreign country.
There is no better description of Ward and his contributions to the struggle for Black freedom, citizenship and equality. There is also that sad coda to Douglass’ reminiscence: Ward had since turned his back on the United States, ending his life in obscurity in Jamaica. That may explain why Ward, who gave up on America, has escaped the biographer’s gaze. Searching for an explanation of Ward’s later years, historian Tim Watson could do no better than call it “remarkable and strange.” He could have added “elusive.”
Ward was born enslaved on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1817. He and his parents escaped when he was a young child to rural southern New Jersey, where they settled among other fugitives from slavery in an area dominated by Quakers. Years later, the family moved to the relative safety and anonymity of New York City, where Ward attended the African Free School, whose alumni, including physician James McCune Smith, minister Alexander Crummell and abolitionist William Howard Day, would play prominent roles in the struggle for equal rights.
Ward felt the full force of American racism when a white mob attacked an antislavery meeting in New York City in 1834. It was, in a way, a baptism of fire and an introduction to the struggle that would come to dominate his life for the next 20 years. He was ordained as a Congregationalist minister in 1839. Two years later, he accepted an offer to minister to an all-white congregation in South Butler, New York.
A few years later, Ward moved to a larger, also all-white congregation in Cortland, New York. It was during this period that he established himself as one of the leading figures in the struggle against slavery and discrimination in the U.S. He was employed as a lecturer for the American Antislavery Society, and when the society split in 1840, Ward threw in his lot with the new American and Foreign Antislavery Society, believing that the Constitution and involvement in the political process offered the best means of ending slavery.