Princeton University Press has
published a new microhistory of the case of an enslaved person in 19th
century America.
ABOUT THE BOOK
James Collins Johnson made his
name by escaping slavery in Maryland and fleeing to Princeton, New Jersey,
where he built a life in a bustling community of African Americans working at
what is now Princeton University. After only four years, he was recognized by a
student from Maryland, arrested, and subjected to a trial for extradition under
the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. On the eve of his rendition, after attempts to
free Johnson by force had failed, a local aristocratic white woman purchased
Johnson’s freedom, allowing him to avoid re-enslavement. The
Princeton Fugitive Slave reconstructs James Collins Johnson’s
life, from birth and enslaved life in Maryland to his daring escape,
sensational trial for re-enslavement, and last-minute change of fortune, and
through to the end of his life in Princeton, where he remained a figure of
local fascination.
Stories of Johnson’s life in
Princeton often describe him as a contented, jovial soul, beloved on campus and
memorialized on his gravestone as “The Students Friend.” But these familiar
accounts come from student writings and sentimental recollections in alumni
reports—stories from elite, predominantly white, often southern sources whose
relationships with Johnson were hopelessly distorted by differences in race and
social standing. In interrogating these stories against archival records,
newspaper accounts, courtroom narratives, photographs, and family histories,
author Lolita Buckner Inniss builds a picture of Johnson on his own terms,
piecing together the sparse evidence and disaggregating him from the other
black vendors with whom he was sometimes confused.
By telling Johnson’s story and
examining the relationship between antebellum Princeton’s black residents and
the economic engine that supported their community, the book questions the
distinction between employment and servitude that shrinks and threatens to
disappear when an individual’s freedom is circumscribed by immobility, lack of
opportunity, and contingency on local interpretations of a hotly contested body
of law.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
By (author) Lolita Buckner
Inniss
Lolita Buckner Inniss, J.D.,
LL.M., Ph.D., is a professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of
Law, where she is a Robert G. Storey Distinguished Faculty Fellow. Her research
addresses historic, geographic, metaphoric, and visual norms of law, especially
in the context of race, gender, and comparative constitutionalism.
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