From Slavery to Salvation; the autobiography of Rev. Thomas W. Henry of the AME Church

Thomas W. Henry was an enslaved blacksmith born in Maryland in 1794. He became a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1827, then in 1835 a minister and elder in the new African Methodist Episcopal Church. His autobiography was recovered from a near-illegible copy at Howard University by Jean Libby, who annotated and illustrated it as well as transcribed it verbatim into larger type. First published in 1994 by the University Press of Mississippi. Rev. Thomas W. Henry was suspected of being in conspiracy with John Brown. That documentation (discovered by historian Benjamin Quarles in Allies for Freedom, Blacks and John Brown is included in the essay, as well as ties to the Underground Railroad.