The Frontpiece of My Life in the South

By Polly Wilbert​
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Jacob Stroyer, a former South Carolina slave, lived and ministered to African Americans in Salem for 25 years.  He wrote a memoir of slavery, My Life in the South, which was published in 1879 and in later editions and reprints. Proceeds from the book’s sales helped him further his theological education in the 1880s at Talladega College in Alabama and at Oberlin Seminary in Ohio.  Excerpts from Stroyer’s memoir were included more recently with seven other individual histories of slavery in From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives, and his experiences continue to be referenced in the study of African-American history.
 
One of 15 children of his father, who was known as Will, a slave brought from Sierra Leone, and his mother Chloe, a slave born in South Carolina, who was his father’s second wife, Stroyer was one of 465 slaves (as many as 150 of them children) on the Singleton plantation near Columbia, S.C.  Of his time on the plantation, Stroyer wrote in detail of frequent violent whippings and harsh beatings by overseers, whom his parents were powerless to stop and who prayed daily for freedom for themselves and their children. When he was an old enough child, he worked with horses, helped with hogs, and for a brief time served as a helper to a plantation carpenter, which was stopped by the overseer who sent him to work in the fields as punishment for his independent spirit.
 
In 1863, Stroyer was among ten slaves taken, along with more from other plantations, to work on fortifications on Sullivan’s Island at Charleston, SC and to wait on Confederate officers.  After a return to the plantation, in 1864, he was sent to work at Ft. Sumter, where he was wounded in July in a nighttime Union bombardment, taken to a hospital in Charleston, and then returned to Columbia, where he was when President Lincoln freed the slaves. At about the time of the Emancipation, General Sherman was camped at Columbia. Stroyer wrote that Sherman’s troops pillaged the plantation for stores, horses, and mules for their march through Georgia, but took nothing from the slaves.
 
After the war, Stroyer, who had learned to read a little (which was illegal for a slave), went to school, first in Columbia, then in Charleston, and, in 1870, to Worcester to evening schools and then for two years (1873-1874) to Worcester Academy. He was licensed as a preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and, in 1876, ordained a deacon in Newport, R.I. 
 
Stroyer’s move to Worcester was likely due to his meeting the Rev. T. Willard Lewis, pastor of Worcester’s Laurel Street Methodist Church, who first went to South Carolina as a missionary in 1862 and to Charleston, when it fell in 1865, to minister to and organize black Methodists.  Records show that in 1867, Mary (Perkins) Stroyer (Jacob’s 14-year-old wife, born in Camden, SC; Stroyer was about 18) was working for Lewis as a cook and laundress.  Lewis may have used his connections to help Jacob move to Worcester to continue his education.  Lewis died of yellow fever in Charleston in 1871 and is buried on Sullivan’s Island, with a tombstone that records his support of and ministry to freed slaves.
 
Worcester’s 1870s census listings describe Jacob as either a laborer or a carpenter.  The 1880 census lists Jacob and Mary at 3 Lilly Street, Worcester, with Jacob being a “book agent” and Mary, a domestic servant.    However, records also show that in 1878 Mary had started legal proceedings against Jacob for desertion.  (In 1879, Jacob is listed as living at 19 Harbor Street, Salem -- now condo’s.  In later years, he boarded at 41 Roslyn St.)  In 1880, Mary purchased a house at 3 Bath Street, Worcester, where her sister and brother-in-law were also listed as living in 1882.  Mary was “active in the AME Zion Church and Good Samaritan Lodge until her death at age 35, in 1888”, and left her house to two sisters. 
 
In 1877, at the invitation of the minister of Salem’s South Church, Jacob came here, where he preached and ministered off and on for 25 years to Salem’s small (about 300) African-American community as founder and pastor of the Salem Colored Mission.  It’s possible that no one in Salem, or possibly only a few intimates, knew that Stroyer was married.  He died, in February 1908, from heart disease following a bronchial infection. His funeral was attended by 400 of Salem’s community, including the mayor.  The text on his Greenlawn gravestone, paid for by Stroyer’s friends, chronicles his life and his slavery as detailed in his memoir, but makes no mention of Mary.

Note: The research for this article was initially undertaken for a past Friends of Greenlawn tour at Greenlawn Cemetery. 

Sources:
My Life in the South, Jacob Stroyer
National Humanities Center, Excerpts from My Life in the South
Website for From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives
Blogpost, Clark University Professor Janette Thomas Greenwood, The Camden-Worcester Connection, The Rev. T. Willard Lewis (research on the Perkins family)
Ancestry.com:  Mary Stroyer bank account application, Charleston, SC; Salem Colored Mission information