As an orphaned child, he likely lived briefly among the Pamunkey Native American Tribe before the Freedmen’s Bureau sent him to be adopted by a white family in Boston in 1866.

Stanford is the author of two memoirs:The Plea of the Ex-Slaves Now in Canada (1885) and From Bondage to Liberty (1889) as well as three editions of the textbook titled The Tragedy of the Negro in America (1897, 1897, 1903).

Wells, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass, his writings are part of a legacy of African American antislavery literature between abolition and the Harlem Renaissance.

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.

Like the earlier antislavery writer Harriet Wilson,[7] Stanford suffered abuse at their hands: he was overworked and underfed in a living situation not unlike enslavement.

At this time, he joined a community of people who helped him to find work and to learn to read and write English,[citation needed] including the Brooklyn pastor Henry Highland Garnet and famous writer Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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).

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.