This essay is about some of the most cynical texts of the eighteenth century, criminal conversion narratives in which enslaved men confess to crimes they allegedly committed and in which they relate their religious conversion while awaiting execution. Criminal conversion narratives — also called “dying speeches,” “dying confessions,” “criminal narratives,” or “confession and conversion narratives” — resemble slave narratives, but their trajectory is different. While slave narratives tell the story of an autobiographical subject who obtains freedom after going through tribulations, dying speeches send their narrators directly to the scaffold to die, while promising a life liberated from sins in the afterworld. Like slave narratives, criminal conversion narratives follow a formulaic script: black narrators recount their experiences of enslavement, in both northern and southern states, and their escapes and journeys throughout what would become the United States, sometimes all the way to the Caribbean and Canada; they relate and confess the crimes they allegedly committed, from stealing food and clothing to raping white women and murdering their masters. As a rule, the narrators then address how they were caught, put into jail, tried in court, found guilty, and sentenced to death. These (auto)biographical accounts are then followed by passages in which the narrators describe their religious conversion, their repentance for the crimes with which they have been charged, and their strong belief in deliverance from their sins through faith. Dying speeches close this way, or conclude with passages written by the white editors and printers who chronicle the events that follow, detailing the execution of the verdict, “death by hanging,” from their own perspectives. As ostensibly first-person accounts of the lives of enslaved men, these criminal conversion narratives seem to provide early instances of black life writing that help us recover black speakers’ voices. However, these narratives are formulaic enactments of criminal confession and conversion that stage the personae of enslaved black men in ways suited to enact the scripts of white-coded religious and legal discourses.

As Christy Webb notes, dying speeches served their audiences “as both a religious cautionary tale and sensational entertainment” (2004). Relating these texts to the religious, literary, political, and legal discourses of the time allows us to consider how they functioned as cautionary tales, as vignettes of religious and moral instruction, as pieces of leisurely entertainment, and also as instruments of abolitionist campaigning.