KNARRATIVE bookshelf
The New Man: Twenty-nine Years a Slave, Twenty-nine Years a Free Man
by Henry Clay Bruce (1836-1902)
Henry Clay (H.C.) Bruce was born in 1836 on a tobacco plantation in Prince Edward County, Virginia, owned by Lemuel Bruce. Actual birthdates of enslaved people were rarely recorded. But his mother knew his birth year because it was the same year as a national event—the election of Martin Van Buren as President of the United States. Over the 29 years of his enslavement, Bruce and his family were sold to Missouri and their labor and bodies rented out before gaining freedom following the Civil War. A brother, Blanche K. Bruce (who was produced after the rape of their mother by the plantation owner), became the first Black United States Senator, representing Mississippi from 1875-1881. Before the Senate, Blanche K. Bruce, was the Register of the United States Treasury and got H.C. a job in the Post Office Department at a salary of $720 a year. He chronicles his life in and out of bondage in Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man, which was published in 1895.