Stanford never knew his father, who was sold by slave traders before he was born. When he was a toddler, his enslavers made him an orphan by selling his mother Caroline. As a young child, Stanford shared that he lived for two years among a community of
Indigenous people, likely the
Pamunkey Native American tribe. Over time, Stanford’s stories about his time with
Algonquian-speaking people grew. In
The Plea (1885), Stanford includes untranslated Algonquian songs, perhaps as a way to express some degree of fluency in the language and connection to the community. He then increases his claim in his second memoir,
From Bondage to Liberty (1889). At the time, curiosity and exoticization of people from
Africa,
Asia, and
India was commonplace among White European and European-descended communities, a large proportion of Stanford’s audience. Around 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau sent the young Stanford to Boston as an orphan to be adopted by a White couple. Like the earlier antislavery writer
Harriet Wilson, Stanford suffered abuse at their hands: he was overworked and underfed in a living situation not unlike enslavement. In 1871, he ran away from his adoptive family and arrived in New York. At this time, he joined a community of people who helped him to find work and to learn to read and write English, including the
Brooklyn pastor
Henry Highland Garnet and famous writer
Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1875, Stanford converted to
Christianity. By 1880, Stanford became one of the first African Americans to graduate from Connecticut’s Suffolk Institute. Stanford then became a pastor of African American churches in
Hartford, Connecticut. By 1881, Stanford had gone to Ontario, Canada at the request of the Amherstburg Baptist Association (ABA). In May 1883, Stanford traveled by steamer from Canada to Liverpool also by request of the ABA. Once in England, Stanford’s reputation grew and he became the first African American minister in
Birmingham as the pastor of Hope Street Chapel (now Highgate Baptist Church). In 1895, Stanford returned to America where he would live permanently for the rest of his life, visiting England briefly only once more. During their lifetimes, Stanford and his wife Beatrice Stickley were both active members of The Society for the Recognition of the Universal Brotherhood of Man (SRBM), the organization founded by
Catherine Impey that published the antiracist journals
Fraternity,
Anti-Caste, and
The Bonds of Brotherhood. In 1897, Stanford founded the St. Mark’s Congregational Church of Roxbury, the first African American church in Boston. He also founded the Interdenominational Ministers Association of Boston, and in
North Cambridge, Massachusetts, he organized an
orphanage and school for single women and girls known at one point as the Union Industrial and Strangers’ Home. With
William Monroe Trotter, the civil rights activist and founder of Boston’s
Guardian newspaper, Stanford ventured into political discussions. He served as vice-president of Baltimore’s Christ’s Medical and Chirurgical College and he was editor of its 1909 journal. Stanford also was the vice-president for the National Baptist Convention of Massachusetts. == Personal life ==