Solomon Bayley worked as a farmer and at a sawmill.
25 Facts About Solomon Bayley
1.
2.
Solomon Bayley learned that his maternal grandmother was born in Guinea, where she was captured at the age of eleven, sold into slavery, and transported to the Thirteen Colonies in 1690.
3.
Solomon Bayley's mother had thirteen children while the same family enslaved them.
4.
Solomon Bayley's mother escaped with a young son and finally reached New Jersey.
5.
Solomon Bayley was held in Delaware and trained as a cooper.
6.
Solomon Bayley had already, since enslaved people could not marry, informally married Thamar, an enslaved woman on another Delaware plantation, and they had a nine-month-old son.
7.
Solomon Bayley returned to Delaware, where he was briefly reunited with his wife, but knew he could not stay.
8.
Solomon Bayley moved on to Dover and then to Camden, Delaware.
9.
Solomon Bayley sued in a Delaware court for his freedom, saying he had been illegally sold out of state.
10.
Solomon Bayley first "hired out" his wife from her enslaver, paying for her time to keep her with him.
11.
Solomon Bayley worked to save money to buy her outright; and he paid her enslaver about $103 dollars.
12.
Solomon Bayley started work in a sawmill to earn more money.
13.
Prices had risen, and Solomon Bayley despaired of being able to buy him, but white men who knew Solomon Bayley from the Methodist church aided him in buying his son's freedom, at a price of more than $360.
14.
About this time, Solomon Bayley arranged for his mother to come to them from New Jersey, and she lived with him to "a great age", as her mother had done.
15.
In 1820, Solomon Bayley met Robert Hurnard, a Quaker and abolitionist from Essex, England, who was visiting Delaware.
16.
Solomon Bayley corresponded with Bayley for years afterward, and Hurnard wrote a preface for the memoir published in London in 1825.
17.
Solomon Bayley learned about Paul Cuffee, a wealthy African-American shipbuilder in Boston, Massachusetts, who promoted free blacks emigrating to Africa.
18.
Solomon Bayley served as a Methodist missionary and worked as a farmer.
19.
Solomon Bayley was successful in gaining an out-of-court settlement that included his enslaver's accepting an arrangement whereby he could buy his freedom over time.
20.
Bayley's memoir, A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley, is one of the earliest of the genre known as slave narratives.
21.
Solomon Bayley expresses his religious faith throughout his escape, his efforts to buy freedom for himself and his family and other trials.
22.
Solomon Bayley was a Methodist who saw his life through a Christian perspective.
23.
Raboteau noted that Solomon Bayley was inspired to compassion by his Christian faith, drawing from it to grapple with challenges in slavery and as a free man.
24.
Solomon Bayley wrote in his memoir that it was extremely difficult.
25.
In 1833 Solomon Bayley published his "A Brief Account of the Colony of Liberia", based on his emigration to the African colony and worked there as a missionary.