The REV. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life

This work is an experimental autobiography: Loguen’s life story is narrated as a third-person account of his early life in slavery, his escape north, and his ministerial and abolitionist activities in New York and Canada.

Loguen is a significant figure in nineteenth-century abolitionism and African American literature. A highly respected leader in the AME Zion Church, Rev. Loguen was popularly known as “Underground Railroad King” in Syracuse, New York, where he was eventually credited with helping over 1,500 fugitives escape from slavery.|

The Rev. J. W. Loguen constitutes an important contribution to the African American slave narrative tradition. It has been favorably compared to Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and it anticipates many of the themes explored in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)