Amanda Smith: An Autobiography

It is the Wesleyan-holiness evangelist's own story of a life of faith: born into slavery in Maryland, freed, sanctified, and sent out as an independent missionary and evangelist across America, Britain, India, and West Africa. It recounts her conversion and sanctification, her call to preach, and decades of remarkable gospel labour on four continents, largely supported by faith alone.

Amanda Berry Smith was a nineteenth-century Black American evangelist, born a slave, who became one of the best-known holiness preachers of her age. Without formal backing or education, she travelled and preached across the United States, the British Isles, India, and Africa, and was widely respected as a woman of deep faith and evident spiritual power.

By a sense of divine call and a life of radical trust in God. After conversion and the experience of sanctification, Smith began to exercise a preaching and evangelistic ministry that carried her, step by step and often on faith alone for her support, from American camp meetings to England, then India, and then years of missionary work in West Africa — an extraordinary path for a Black woman of her time.

A central one. Smith testifies to a definite experience of entire sanctification in the Wesleyan-holiness tradition — a cleansing and empowering that she saw as the turning point of her spiritual life and the source of her ministry. The autobiography is, in large part, the story of a sanctified life lived out in bold obedience to God.

Smith spent years in West Africa in evangelism and in caring for children, laboring under great hardship and often alone. Her account gives a first-hand picture of missionary life on the continent through the eyes of a Black American woman, and reflects both the cost of the work and her steady confidence in God's provision and call.

Because it is a rare and vivid first-person record of a Black woman who rose from slavery to an internationally known ministry, spanning four continents. It stands as a landmark of African American religious autobiography and of the holiness movement, preserving the voice and testimony of a remarkable evangelist too often left out of the histories.

A bold, holiness-shaped, deeply trusting faith — one that took God at his word for guidance, provision, and power, and obeyed his call across daunting obstacles of race, gender, and poverty. Smith writes plainly and warmly, and her story is above all a testimony to what such faith, in an ordinary yet extraordinary life, could accomplish.

At the beginning, with her early life in slavery, conversion, and sanctification, and on through her widening ministry across continents. It is a long, first-person narrative best read in order, so that the reader follows the whole arc of a life carried by faith from a Maryland slave cabin to the mission fields of the world.