Twenty-two years a slave and forty years a freeman

Born a slave in Virginia in 1793, Austin Steward escaped bondage, but his road to freedom did not involve the underground railroad or the use of disguises. Nor did he have to escape from slave catchers and bloodhounds. His story is important because of how he achieved his freedom and what he did with his later life. Transported in his youth to upper New York State by a master who fled business and gambling debts in the South, Steward won his freedom in 1815 because of New York's emancipation laws. Then, with the help of sympathetic white friends in Rochester during the 1820s, he became a prosperous merchant. Book jacket.