Book Review: Becoming Lunsford Lane: The Lives of an American Aeneas
Becoming Lunsford Lane: The Lives of an American Aeneas. By Craig Thompson Friend. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2025. Hardcover, 432 pp., $37.50.
Reviewed by Tim Talbott
The wealth of documentation left by formerly enslaved people who told their life narratives is simply incredible. Some of these individuals, along with their exploits to gain freedom, became famous at the time and have maintained a recognized status into the twenty-first century. Men like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry “Box’ Brown, and Solomon Northup; women like Harriet Jacobs; and husband and wife team William and Ellen Craft, left painful yet inspiring accounts that have in turn produced Pulitzer Prize winning books and Academy Award winning motion pictures.[1]
Other individuals have not been so fortunate. For whatever reason their narratives did not produce the staying power of those mentioned above. Despite this, the more obscure narratives about people who found a way out of slavery also offer much for modern day readers and historians. Through the stories they tell and the pieces of information and data that they left, researchers can potentially draw out a more expansive life story than those often offered in their original narratives. An excellent example is Becoming Lunsford Lane: The Lives of an American Aeneas by professor and historian Craig Thompson Friend.
As Friend so well explains in the book’s thorough introduction: “Lunsford Lane lived many lives populated by many people. He was an enslaved man until 1835, a free Black Southerner between 1835 and 1842, and a Black Northerner from 1842 to 1879. He was a Black man trying to determine what it meant to be an American, often wanting to celebrate himself as a self-made man but uncertain about tearing down the veil of racism that hung between himself and opportunity. He was a man who drew many audiences over his lifetime because he was willing to write his life to meet their expectations and not his realities, creating a mythical Lunsford Lane which he could not control as it overwhelmed his life and his own sense of self.” (5)
Over the years, North Carolinian Lunsford Lane has often been portrayed as exceptional for his time and race. Yet as Friend’s research shows, myth and legend have largely hidden the true story of Lane’s life. Friend wisely reminds us throughout his biography of Lane that “We do not have to ascribe agency and activism to Lunsford Lane. He simply was.” Too often Black people do not get the credit they deserve for just being. Friend explains, “It was not so unusual for an enslaved man to make money and aspire to freedom. It was not unique for a free Black Southern man to own a house and raise a family. It was not abnormal for a Black Northern man to do what he could to pursue happiness. His humanity and story deserve recognition because, like Aeneas, he endured. He found ways to survive enslavement, racism, and their attendant violence. Lunsford Lane just lived. Was that not enough to ask of a nineteenth century Black American? Is it not enough to ask of anyone?” (10)
To help tell Lunsford Lane’s life story, Friend divides the book into two parts containing fifteen chapters in total; seven in the first part and eight in the second part. By digging deep into the archive and seemingly leaving no source stone unturned, readers get a clear picture of who Lunsford Lane truly was and the worlds he inhabited.
A fascinating point that Friend examines within the text is the friction expressed by some abolitionists over the practice of one purchasing liberty for oneself, or that of another enslaved person. Some anti-slavery advocates viewed this method of emancipation as condoning slavery as a legitimate institution and bowing to the commodification of human beings. For high-minded—but perhaps unrealistic—abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who believed the way to end slavery was through moral suasion, money spent toward digging at the root cause of slavery was of better use than toward purchasing enslaved people to free them.
The pro-con nature of these ideas had an impact on Lane after he had purchased himself and then hit the northern speech circuit attempting to raise funds to buy the freedom of his wife and children. Lane did not consider himself an abolitionist, yet he used the antislavery platform to earn fees for his more pragmatic-minded goal of freeing his family. Friend explains, “Despite Lane’s praise as an Aeneas and revolutionary, his was not the historical narrative of Black America that abolitionists and Black historians imagined or wanted.” (159)
Friend also explains that Lane’s story broke from most traditional slave narratives in that he offered little credit for Christian or religious influence in attaining his deliverance from bondage. Like some other authors of slave narratives, but who were perhaps more subtle in their criticisms, Lane saw an enormous amount of hypocrisy within religion and its often conservative take on the institution. These thought-provoking points, among others, are a true highlight of the book.
The book’s combined notes/bibliography section, which runs at over eighty pages, shows Friend’s meticulous research. His writing is clear and he tells Lane’s story with an honesty readers will appreciate. With family being such an important part of Lane’s life, Friend includes a genealogical chart to help show the connections to the many people referenced in the text. Over twenty images and three maps are also included.
Becoming Lunsford Lane: The Lives of an American Aeneas is another welcome addition to the growing list of biographies examining those individuals who produced slave narratives. It reminds us that there was a wide diversity of ideas expressed by those who attained their freedom and that they employed various methods and endured different experiences in order to achieve the goal of living a life in which they could benefit from their liberty while pursuing happiness.
[1] David Blight won the Pulitzer Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom in History in 2019. Master Slave Husband Wife an Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2024. Based on Solomon Northup’s life, Director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave received Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screen Play, and Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o) in 2014.
