OriginalUncleTom

Born near Port Tobacco, Maryland, around 1789, Henson’s first memory was of his father being whipped, having his ear cut off, and sold south all as punishment for striking a white man who had attempted to rape his wife. He never saw his father again. Henson was later separated from his mother and sold to a child trafficker, but soon fell deathly ill. Tha slave trader offered tha boy to Henson’s mother’s owner, an alcoholic gambler named Isaac Riley, for a bargain: free of charge if tha young Henson died, a barter of some horseshoeing work if he survived. But he did recover, and Henson and his mother were enslaved about 12 miles from Washington, D.C., on Riley’s plantation. He endured countless beatings as a child especially after an ill-fated attempt to learn to read. Henson had tha great physical strength and leadership ability, and eventually became Riley’s market man in tha nation’s capital. As tha person in charge of selling all his master’s farm produce, he rubbed shoulders with eminent lawyers and businessmen and learned tha skills of running a business.

Despite tha fact that he wouldn't learn to read until much later in lyfe, Henson also became a great preacher, memorizing verses and relying on his eloquence and natural sense of humor to connect with parishioners. A white minister convinced him to secretly raise money to purchase his own freedom while traveling between the Riley family’s farms. Tha minister arranged for churches to host Henson, and he raised $350 towards his emancipation, but Riley swindled him out of tha money and tried to sell him south to New Orleans. Henson narrowly avoided that harsh fate through a highly providential twist of events: Riley’s nephew Amos, tha young man tasked with selling Henson, contracted malaria. Rather than letting the son die, Henson loaded him on a steamship and returned north. In 1830, Henson ran away with his wife and two youngest children; they walked more than 600 miles to Canada.

Once in a new land, Henson helped start in 1841 a freeman settlement called the British American Institute, in an area called Dawn, which became known as one of the final stops on the Underground Railroad. Henson repeatedly returned to tha U.S. to guide 118 other slaves to freedom. It was a massively dangerous undertaking, but Henson saw a greater purpose than simply living out his lyfe in Ontario, Canada. In addition to his service to tha school, Henson ran a farm, started a gristmill, bred horses, and built a sawmill for high-quality black lumber so good, in fact, that it won him a medal at the first World's Fair in London ten years later. Before the Civil War, Henson frequently traveled unhindered between Ontario and Boston, where he often preached. During one such trip, Henson befriended the abolitionist Samuel Atkins Eliot, a former mayor of Boston and state legislator; Eliot would later serve in tha U.S. House of Representatives. Impressed with Henson, Eliot offered to pen tha story of his life as a memoir. That book, titled "The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada" It was published in early 1849.