The Project

FOSA Volunteers

The central inspiration for our work is the life of Venture Smith (circa 1728-1805), enslaved as a child in West Africa, who later bought his freedom at an enormous personal price in pre-Revolutionary Connecticut. Smith then went on to emancipate others while gaining great prominence as a landowner, trader, and commercial entrepreneur. His autobiographical Narrative, recounted at the close of his life, a classic in early American literature, is the sole recollection by a former 18th-century American slave of his African homeland, who survived the terrors of the “Middle Passage,” and achieved freedom in America. Venture Smith’s direct descendants live on today, reaching the 11th generation, and are fully committed to ensuring that their ancestor’s legacy is both shared and devoted to addressing the problems of our age.

The Project was formally launched on September 19, 2005, the 200th anniversary of Venture’s death, by project leaders Chandler B. Saint, president of the Beecher House Center for the Study of Equal Rights, Torrington, CT, and David Richardson, director of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull, UK, in collaboration with the University of Connecticut.

Documenting Venture Smith Project mobilizes scholars from three continents in unprecedented
interdisciplinary collaborations. Archaeologists, genomic scientists, literary scholars, geographers,
historians, political scientists, philosophers, and a poet have joined with Venture Smith’s descendants in a collaborative effort to reconstruct all that might be learned about the life of this extraordinary individual.

This work includes excavation of the Smith family’s gravesite to ascertain what could be learned from the surviving remains and genetic evidence — an enterprise that led to a BBC documentary in 2007, A Slave’s Story. The Project also has developed an expansive genetic map of the Smith family descendants and ongoing efforts to preserve the largely untouched 500-acre site, in Haddam Connecticut, upon which the Smith’s homestead and trading business once stood.

It inspired a prize-winning poet/collaborator, Marilyn Nelson, to publish an extraordinary collection,
The Freedom Business (2008) that evokes in unforgettable word pictures the bittersweet travails of
Smith’s enslavement and freedom.

The scholarly collaboration has produced a book of original essays, each by a distinguished scholar, entitled Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom (University of Massachusetts Press, in press). Such work helps secure Smith’s central importance in early American history.

Most recently, the Project has led to the publication of a highly accessible popular biography,
Making Freedom: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) designed for mass audiences, high school history courses, and public libraries.

The Project has also produced a CD of a historical re-enactor reading Venture Smith’s Narrative.
Combined with low-cost reprints of the Narrative, the package is aimed at mass distribution to schools, with lesson plans for all levels of classroom instruction. They will also be available for free downloading on an App and the Documenting Venture Smith website, currently being developed. The Project has also produced maps, timelines and other visual images as components of a traveling Venture Smith exhibit, suitable for classrooms and historical societies, for release in the late fall of 2009.

Finally, the Project has mobilized the Venture Smith story as a means of inspiring ongoing efforts to
combat the scourge of slavery in our time by developing antislavery coalitions with NGOs, religious
groups, and governmental agencies.

CLICK HERE FOR A LIST OF PROJECT PRESENTATIONS