Nicolas Said was an Enslaved Africa Who Gain Emancipation, Traveled to Europe’s Royal Courts, and Fought in the Civil War

History Unplugged Podcast · Mar 21, 2023 · 41m

In the late 1830s a young black man was born into a world of wealth and privilege in the powerful, thousand-year-old African kingdom of Borno. But instead of becoming a respected general like his fearsome father (who was known as The Lion), Nicolas Said’s fate was to fight a very different kind of battle.

At the age of thirteen, Said was kidnapped and sold into slavery, beginning an epic journey that would take him across Africa, Asia, Europe, and eventually the United States, where he would join one of the first African American regiments in the Union Army. Nicholas Said would then spend the…