If you have come looking for a short answer, here it is: An Autobiography is the life story, told in her own plain and joyful words, of Amanda Berry Smith (1837–1915) — a woman born into slavery who became one of the most sought-after holiness evangelists of the nineteenth century, preaching on both sides of the Atlantic and carrying the gospel to England, India, and West Africa. Its full title, The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, tells you exactly what kind of book it is. This is not a memoir about Amanda Smith so much as a testimony about the God who, as she saw it, kept meeting her at the ironing board, in the meeting-house, and on the ship’s deck. Ochorus hosts the complete text for free, and this guide is meant to help you read it well.
What the book is, and who Amanda Smith was
Amanda Berry Smith was born enslaved in Maryland. Her father bought his own freedom and then labored to purchase his wife and children, and she never forgot that her liberty had been paid for at a cost. She worked as a washerwoman and domestic servant, was widowed and remarried, buried children, and knew hunger and grief long before she knew a pulpit. Then, in a Methodist meeting in New York, she received what she and her tradition called the blessing of entire sanctification, and her life turned outward. Without money, sponsorship, or the endorsement most preachers of her day relied on, she began to travel — first to camp meetings across the American Northeast, then to Britain, then for years in India and Africa — supported, she insisted, only by prayer and by gifts that arrived exactly when they were needed.
She dictated this book in a voice that never pretends to be anything other than hers: warm, funny, self-deprecating, and utterly certain of God. She writes about slavery and racism without bitterness but also without flinching, and she writes about her own doubts as candidly as her victories. Early on she gives the reader the key to her whole outlook:
I often say to people that I have a right to shout more than some folks; I have been bought twice, and set free twice, and so I feel I have a good right to shout. Hallelujah!Amanda Berry Smith
Bought once out of slavery, bought again by the blood of Christ — that double deliverance is the engine of the entire narrative.
The story’s arc
The book moves, roughly, in three great stages, and it helps to read it with that shape in mind.
The first stage is her early life: birth into slavery, the family’s hard-won freedom, girlhood in Pennsylvania, marriage, and conversion. Here she narrates the moving deathbed scene in which a young mistress extracts the promise that Amanda’s mother and children will be given their freedom — an answer, she believes, to her grandmother’s prayers.
The second stage is the crisis and turning point: her long struggle over sanctification, her doubts, the moment of assurance, and her first hesitant steps into public ministry. This is the heart of the book. She describes, with almost cinematic detail, the ordinary Friday when she stopped ironing to settle the question forever, and she records the sudden, trembling call to leave home and go to a town she had only heard of.
The third stage is the worldwide ministry: camp meetings at Kennebunk and Knoxville, the crossing to Liverpool, revival in Scotland and London, years of famine-orphan work and great meetings in India, and finally the long, costly African chapters — Monrovia, Cape Palmas, Old Calabar, temperance work, schools, and the adoption of an African child she calls Little Bob. The closing chapters bring her back to England for a season of faith-healing and then home again. Read straight through, the arc is unmistakable: a formerly enslaved washerwoman becomes a missionary whose reach circles the globe.
The central themes
Entire sanctification and the life of holiness
More than anything, this is a holiness book. Smith belongs to the Wesleyan tradition that expected a definite second work of grace beyond conversion — a cleansing of the heart and a filling with the Spirit. Her account of receiving it, in a sermon by Brother Inskip, is one of the great testimonies of the movement:
“The Lord,” I said, “has sanctified my soul.” And they were speechless! I said no more, but passed on, swinging my arm! I suppose the people thought I was wild, and I was, for God had set me on fire! “O,” I thought, “if there was a platform around the world I would be willing to get on it and walk and tell everybody of this sanctifying power of God!”Amanda Berry Smith
Notice that the experience is inseparable from her doubts. When the enemy whispered that she had no witness to the blessing, she took the matter straight to God with startling boldness: “Lord, I don’t know what to ask as a direct witness to this blessing, but give me something that shall be so clear and distinct that the Devil will never attack me again on that point while I live.” Readers who want the theology behind such prayers will find it in classic holiness Scriptures such as 1 Thessalonians 5:23, Hebrews 12:14, and Hebrews 13:12.
God’s provision and guidance
Smith never took a salary and rarely knew where the next fare or meal would come from, yet the book is a running ledger of provision arriving on time. In Africa she watched an old promise made good pound by pound:
It was not long after I got there before my loving Father, God, began to fulfill that blessed old promise, that He gave me when I left America: “My God will supply all your need according to His riches in glory, by Christ Jesus.” Phil. 4:19.Amanda Berry Smith
Her guidance came the same way — a word, a text, a name spoken to her heart. She heard the single word “Salem” and obeyed, though she knew no one there. Read her alongside Philippians 4:19, John 15:7, and Psalm 34:8, and the pattern becomes a small course in living by faith.
Faith across race and nation
Smith is honest about the racism she carried and the racism she met. She confesses a lifelong wariness of white people — and then describes the morning that fear was broken by a verse she suddenly understood for the first time:
They seemed to come from the northeast corner of the church, slowly, but clearly: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28.) I never understood that text before. But now the Holy Ghost had made it clear to me.Amanda Berry Smith
That verse became the ground on which she stood in every white pulpit and every foreign country. Her ministry crossed lines of race, class, and nation not as a program but as the plain implication of the gospel she preached.
The missionary calling
The later half of the book is a missionary journal, and it belongs in the same conversation as Matthew 28:19, Acts 1:8, and Isaiah 6:8. Smith did not go abroad because a board sent her; she went because she believed God said go, and she stayed through fever, loneliness, and loss. Her chapters on India’s famine orphans and Africa’s schools show a faith that expresses itself in temperance work, education, and the daily care of children — holiness with its sleeves rolled up.
Who should read this book
Read An Autobiography if you love firsthand accounts of revival and the early holiness movement — few are as vivid or as trustworthy. Read it if you are drawn to stories of faith and provision, or if you are wrestling, as Smith did, with what it means to be fully surrendered to God. Read it if you care about the history of Black Christianity in America, or about women in ministry a century before it was widely accepted. And read it if you simply want the company of a joyful, funny, deeply prayerful believer who has been through more than most of us ever will and still ends nearly every paragraph with “Hallelujah.” It asks for no special background; her prose is plain and her heart is open on every page.
How to read it today
A few suggestions will make the reading richer. First, let the dialect and the exclamations stand. The shouts of praise and the reported conversations are not decoration; they are how a nineteenth-century oral testimony sounds, and smoothing them out in your mind would flatten the voice that makes the book great.
Second, keep a Bible beside you. Smith quotes and alludes constantly, and the texts she leans on — Galatians 3:28, Philippians 4:19, John 15:7, Isaiah 35:8 — are worth reading in full where she cites them.
Third, read the hard parts slowly and honestly. Her descriptions of slavery, of being the only Black person in a white congregation, and of the prejudice she met in ministry are told with dignity and without self-pity. Sit with them rather than rushing past; they are part of what her faith cost and part of what it overcame.
Fourth, if the length feels daunting, read it in its three movements — early life, the sanctification crisis, and the worldwide ministry — pausing between each. And when you finish, follow it with a companion volume. The natural next read is A Brand Plucked from the Fire by Julia Foote, another Black holiness woman whose autobiographical testimony runs remarkably parallel to Smith’s. You can also explore more of Amanda Berry Smith’s life and legacy on her author page.
For reflection
Whether you are reading alone, journaling, or gathering a small group, these questions will help you move from Smith’s story into your own.
- Smith says she was “bought twice, and set free twice.” What does it mean to you that your freedom in Christ was purchased at a cost, and how might gratitude for it change the way you live this week?
- Her assurance of sanctification came only after she asked God for a witness she could not doubt. Where in your own life are you living with unsettled questions you have never actually brought to God as directly as she did?
- Read Galatians 3:28 slowly. Smith heard it break a lifelong fear. What division — of race, class, or status — do you still need the Holy Ghost to make “clear” to you?
- Smith went to “Salem” on the strength of a single word, and to Africa on the strength of a promise like Philippians 4:19. What would it look like for you to obey a call before you can see how it will be provided for?
- She expressed her holiness through preaching, temperance work, and the care of orphaned children. If entire devotion to God took practical shape in your circumstances, what is the first thing it would ask of you?
Amanda Berry Smith would tell you that the point of her book is not to admire her but to trust her God. Read An Autobiography in that spirit, and it becomes less a window onto the past than an invitation into the same life of faith she found — bought, set free, and sent.
