John Jea
American poet
John Jea (1773 – after 1817) was an African-American writer, preacher, abolitionist and sailor, best known for his 1811 autobiography The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher. Jea was enslaved from a young age, and after regaining his freedom in the 1790s, he traveled and preached widely.
Early life
Little is known about John Jea's life apart from what he wrote in his autobiography, The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher (1811).
Jea stated that he was born in Africa in 1773 near Calabar in the Bight of Biafra, and that he and his parents, Hambleton Robert Jea and Margaret Jea, and siblings were kidnapped by slave traders and sold into slavery in New York City when he was two and a half years old. Some historians have expressed doubts over these claims (the likelihood of an entire African family managing to survive capture and the high death rate of the Middle Passage, then to be sold collectively to a single owner, is extremely low), and suggested that they may have been fabricated or embellished.
Jea was purchased and held by a Dutch couple, Oliver and Angelika Triebuen. His masters were members of the conservative Dutch Reform Church, which were against converting enslaved people to Christianity around the time they bought Jea. His master initially sent him to church services as a punishment, but Jea became a devout Christian and was baptized in the 1780s.
Prior to his conversion, Jea harbored hatred for Christianity. He associated the religion with the violence of his master, for his master viewed himself as a pious man yet was capable of cruelty, which illustrates the oxymoronic nature of a Christian slave holder.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6241732. VIAF identifies the subject as 13971289. The Library of Congress control number is n92104105. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1773, 1817 and 1811.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Jea” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.