Freedmen's University Podcast

A manicured park located at the helm of North Augusta‘s main thoroughfare – West Forest Avenue – features a monument commemorating the lone white causality of the Hamburg Massacre. As it happens, this violent 1876 event actually left seven men dead, six of whom were black.

Cornish endured an intense journey from slavery—his freedom papers were destroyed in a fire and he subsequently was tracked by slave hunters who tried to capture and resell him. To render himself useless as a slave, he publicly maimed himself at the town square, and eventually ended up in Key West, where he had the island’s first successful farm— a farm mentioned in a 1850s horticultural magazine as well as in all the diaries of citizens of the era. His work as a leader and farmer was so notable, he was visited by President Johnson’s fact-finding commission and the chief justice of the US in 1865.

We take a brief look at what lessons can be learned from the life and experiences of the Freedmen. This episode highlights pastor and abolitionist, Samuel Ringgold Ward.