Silas Jefferson Jr was born on March 29th, 1819 to Patricia and Silas Sr. Born into the plantation system in Mississippi, he was forced into heavy labor from the age of four, usually tasked with pumping water from wells and carrying it wherever it was needed. As he grew, his celerity was recognized by the overseers and he was often pushed into running messages for the overseers to the house or to neighboring plantations or, with supervision, even into town. It was the latter responsibility that gave Silas a chance encounter with a Methodist preacher who snuck him a copy of the Book of Exodus. Silas, as a teenaged slave, didn’t know how to read, but he was willing to learn.

By the time Silas reached the age of 20, he was able to read and write. Reports on his learning process vary, though it’s generally assumed that fellow slave Ruth Finster, purchased by the plantation in 1836, was one of his primary teachers. While he primarily used this to drive his faith, giving impassioned sermons at the secret worship meetings the slaves held, he also used his knowledge to help out his fellow slaves. With some trial-and-error, he learned how to alter messages given to him without the sender or receiver suspecting, exploiting his trick to assign more rest for slaves struggling with exhaustion or illness. When a few of his fellow slaves escaped, including his sister Carol, he hid a fake message in one of their beds with instructions from members of the Underground Railroad. The slave hunters spent days stomping around a swamp to the Northeast while the former slaves fled to the Northwest.

After the war, Silas had no interest in fieldwork. He traveled until he found a Methodist church and worked there a a clerk. After eight years of clerical work and careful savings, he quit to pursue the job he thought God was calling him towards: selling Bibles. Supported by the Methodist church, including a white pastor who would own the business on paper to prevent administrative bias, he travelled the South and Midwest selling individual books of the Bible, hardily bound to appeal to sharecroppers and yeomen. Financial records show he sold mostly at a loss, but per his journals, he didn’t mind so long as he encouraged the Word of God.

In the wake of the scandal in Henshaw, Silas became a stalwart advocate of Victor Freestone, writing numerous articles in various newspapers in his defense. He’d continue to defend him to his dying day; his last article in 1901 was encouraging the Methodist Church to boycott Dixon’s Unnatural Phenomena in the Midwest due to its negative portrayal of Freestone. In 2020, a street in Vicksburg was renamed after him, replacing a previous memorial to General Lee’s horse. There’s a prominent Methodist church on that street; first-time visitors get a pocket-sized Bible, free of charge.