Yale University Press has
published a new book on legal challenges to slavery from US independence to the
Civil War.
ABOUT THE BOOK
For over seventy years and five
generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed
hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders,
taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861,
these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery
on trial in the nation’s capital.
Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives,
William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved
families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them
a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery,
beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in
the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks
us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present
day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William G. Thomas III is
the John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities and Professor of History
at the University of Nebraska. He is co-founder and was director of the
Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia.
More info here
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