Becoming Lunsford Lane:
The Lives of an American Aeneas
by Craig Thompson Friend
Recipient of the 2025 North Caroliniana Society Book Award
The North Caroliniana Society established the North Caroliniana Book Award in 2003 to recognize annually “the book that captures the essence of North Carolina by contributing powerfully to an understanding of the state.” Authors are eligible regardless of residency. However, neither authors nor publishers submit books; instead, a committee privately surveys all books published during the year and chooses the volume that it believes “makes a positive contribution and appears to have the best chance of standing the test of time as a classic volume of North Caroliniana.”
~ May 2026
On May 21, 2026, the 2025 North Caroliniana Society Book Award was presented to Craig Thompson Friend during the Annual Membership Meeting and Awards Banquet held at The Carolina Club on the campus of UNC at Chapel Hill.
More information about the Annual Membership Meeting, including award recipients, can be found in Number 66 of the North Caroliniana Society Imprints, titled Write When You Are Ready by Dr. James W. Clark Jr. A panel of Society collaborators was part of the evening program.
A video of the afternoon’s festivities are available on the SOCIETY’S WEBSITE.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The real life behind the mythical story of Lunsford Lane…
By challenging the rules of enslavement and, later, pushing the boundaries of free citizenship in North Carolina, Lunsford Lane (1803–79) became a folk hero to many enslaved Southerners, as well as a generation of abolitionists. Author of a unique “slave narrative” and a speaking partner with some of the era’s greatest orators, including William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Highland Garnett, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Lane became a celebrity who watched as the persona he created gradually faltered and failed him and his family. Yet even as his influence waned, it was still powerful enough to cause many to remake his image for their own purposes: as a fugitive from slavery, an entrepreneur, a Christian minister, and even an abolitionist (an identity he rejected). Lane also made many enemies who tried to silence him — a white mob determined to tar and feather him, reformers who saw his contributions to abolition as a threat to their causes, and a neighbor who attempted to set fire to the Lane home while Lunsford and his family slept inside.
In the first biography of Lunsford Lane based on original and extensive research, Craig Thompson Friend portrays a man who dreamed beyond his enslavement, delivered himself and his family from bondage, and spun a story of his life that brought him lasting freedom and fleeting fame. Friend casts light on Lane’s family origins as well as his complex relationships with his wife, parents, children, enslavers, fellow abolitionists, and nation. Lane’s story is a biography for our times: a man searching to define life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a changing American society scarred by contentious politics, economic challenges, class tensions, loss of political rights, and racial violence.
Craig Thompson Friend
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Craig Thompson Friend is Alumni Association Distinguished Graduate Professor of History and Public History at North Carolina State University. A specialist in early United States history, he is a former president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and serves as President-Elect of the Historical Society of North Carolina. He has written four monographs on the American Revolutionary and Early Republic eras, and he has edited or co-edited eight scholarly collections on topics ranging from American manhood to historical interpretations of Southern history to American death culture. He spent over a decade researching Becoming Lunsford Lane, funded by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.