Becoming Lunsford Lane

“[Friend’s] writing is clear and he tells Lane’s story with an honesty readers will appreciate. . . . [A]nother welcome addition to the growing list of biographies examining those individuals who produced slave narratives.”—Emerging Civil War

“Friend spent years in an astonishing number of newspaper and archival collections and assembled a multitude of scattered fragments into a comprehensive portrait. The result is a richly detailed tapestry of the multiple worlds that shaped Lunsford Lane.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“Lunsford Lane’s story, ably narrated by Friend, provides invaluable insight into slavery, abolition, and race in the nineteenth century United States.”—Civil War Monitor

“Becoming Lunsford Lane is a must-read for scholars and laypeople alike. It is an exhaustive examination of a Black family traversing nearly a hundred years in the United States.”—Journal of African American History

“This is a work of true excellence, a stunning achievement that combines deep research with elegant prose. Friend’s superb analysis draws a clear distinction between Lane the man and the inventive story of his life that Lane created. Though Friend goes to painstaking lengths to uncover Lane’s full historical truth, it is his fascination with this intriguing person that makes this book so readable.”—Douglas R. Egerton, Le Moyne College

“This is a vital work on one of the most underrated African American reformers of the antebellum era. The writing is strong and often elegant, the arc of the biography long, and the argument for Lane’s importance is, quite simply, unimpeachable. Friend should be congratulated not only for producing a book that does justice to Lunsford Lane as an iconic figure in African American life and letters but also for crafting a biography that approaches high art. Beautiful and at times moving, this is one of the best books I have read in the past several years, on any topic.”—Richard S. Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology

“Friend convincingly shows us that we haven’t had a good look at the real Lunsford Lane—a father, husband, businessman, abolitionist, and medical practitioner—until now.”—Antwain K. Hunter, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Becoming Lunsford Lane is a remarkable work—elegantly written and deeply researched. Craig Friend tells the poignant story of a formerly enslaved man who achieved fame by telling the story of his enslavement. With this book, Lane takes his place alongside other survivors of the inhumanity of slavery, like Frederick Douglass, who willed themselves into the national narrative.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

“In this impeccably researched and riveting book, Craig Friend brilliantly reconstructs the diverse worlds of Lunsford Lane, a self-emancipated abolitionist from North Carolina. Friend expertly leads us through border state slavery, northern abolition, and the aftermath of the Civil War, recovering the little known later checkered life of Lane and his forgotten legacy personified by his descendants' activism. This is not just biography, but a historical tour de force.”—Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920

“How do you tell the story of a storyteller, one made out by contemporaries to be a classical hero, a trickster, a self-made man? Can scholarship take the measure of the famous Lunsford Lane, an ordinary-yet-extraordinary freedman who had to represent both the crimes of slavery and the morality of self-purchase? Craig Friend marshals astonishingly wide and deep research, and a keen sensitivity to the personal costs of freedom as well as slavery. The result is among the most satisfying of the many studies of fugitives we now have, for its specificity, its honesty, and its humanity.”—David Waldstreicher, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence