Title page of Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman; Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West (Rochester, NY: 1857). The Gilder Lehrman Collection.

The Wilberforce Colony flourished under Austin Steward’s leadership during the early and mid-1830s. His autobiography records his own flight to freedom and the struggles of other former slaves who found sanctuary in the Wilberforce Colony.