Smith, Venture

By: David Quigley

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Smith, Venture

(b. c. 1729; d. 19 September 1805),
author of one of the few surviving narratives of eighteenth-century black life on both sides of the Atlantic.

Venture Smith was born into West African royalty in Dukandarra, Guinea. As a young boy, he was stolen into slavery, and he lived and worked in bondage and then in freedom on Long Island and in Connecticut. His life story, published in 1798 as A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Slave, provides rare and extraordinary autobiographical evidence of the central passages of his age: from Africa to America, from freedom to slavery and back to freedom, and from colonial life to the early national experience.

At Smith's birth, his father, Saungm Furro, a prince among the Dukandarra tribe of Guinea, named him Broteer Furro. Upon being taken into slavery in West Africa, a Rhode Island slave trader gave him the name Venture. Smith's experience of the Middle Passage carried him from coastal Africa to Barbados and on to New England in the 1730s. As was typical of many black New Englanders in the early eighteenth century, Smith's adolescence and early adulthood carried him through a range of slave environments. He recalled performing a wide range of domestic tasks while learning numerous trades, and he was renowned for his physical strength and immense size. Smith's initial experiences of American enslavement were on Fishers Island, where he carded wool and harvested crops. These years were filled with owners' threats and the often sadistic use of physical violence. In his narrative Smith describes his many struggles against enslavement and the experience of being sold several times over three decades. He suffered violence at the hands of several masters around southern New England before finally coming up with enough money—“an enormous sum”—to buy his own freedom in 1765.

Smith focused on working hard in the hope of saving enough money to purchase the freedom of family members as well. In time he would liberate his pregnant wife, Meg, whom he married at age twenty-two, and his two sons, Solomon and Cuff. Smith's life in freedom led him through a number of trades, which included clearing forests, operating dwelling houses, and fishing along Long Island Sound. Smith recounted his experience of financial success on Long Island, which helped lead to local legislation expelling free blacks. He took great pride in his business successes and voiced lingering frustrations over the obstacles faced by free blacks in the coastal Northeast.

Smith spent the last decades of his life in East Haddam, Connecticut, where he owned over one hundred acres of property and three houses. In his final years, before falling victim to ill health and blindness, Smith was “mostly employed in the fishing and trafficking business.” Looking back, he resented numerous business dealings with local whites who he claimed had taken advantage of his lack of a formal education. There, in the last years of the eighteenth century, Smith told his life story to his neighbor Elisha Niles, a white schoolteacher. Smith's narrative was published in 1798 to little notice in southern Connecticut. It was republished several times in the nineteenth century, however, with readers often praising the self-made qualities of Smith's life. The text blends together a number of classic American genres: the transatlantic adventure story, the slave narrative, and the Franklinesque autobiography. Modern historians deem Venture Smith's life story to be a particularly illuminating source of early African American history.

See also Autobiography; Entrepreneurs; Free Blacks to 1828; Literature; Occupations; Slave Narratives; Slave Trade; and Slavery: Northeast.

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