Freedom's Mirage
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€91.99
Regular price
€111.99
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€91.99
"Black laws" in slave and free states
"heroic medicine"
A01=Sydney Nathans
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
American Colonization Society
Author_Sydney Nathans
automatic-update
Black calls for voluntary emigration
Blacks in gold-rush California
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BG
Category=DNB
Category=HBJ
Category=HBJK
Category=JFS
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTS
Category=WQH
colonization
COP=United States
Delivery_Pre-order
emancipation
emigration to Liberia
enslaved physician
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
free Blacks in Illinois
free Blacks in Ohio
land clearing and malaria
Language_English
Liberia to 1850
malaria in Africa
mortality in Liberia
Moses Fleetwood (Fleet) Walker
PA=Not yet available
Paul Cameron
plantation medical care
Price_€50 to €100
privileged bondsman
PS=Forthcoming
race relations in slave and free states
return migration from Liberia
Slavery in North Carolina
softlaunch
Stagville plantation of North Carolina
Thomas Bennehan
Virgil Bennehan--biography
Product details
- ISBN 9781469682648
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 2024
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Freedom's Mirage traces the exceptional life of Virgil Bennehan, born in bondage in 1808 in Piedmont North Carolina, who rose to become an enslaved doctor on one of the South's largest plantations and to view himself as a friend to Blacks and whites alike. Emancipated in 1848 but required to leave the state to be free, he was sent to Liberia. Though richly endowed and royally welcomed, he found himself subject to new rulers and mired in the worst medical catastrophe in Liberian history. Recrossing the Atlantic, he boldly returned to North Carolina to warn slave owners that Liberia was a death trap. Yet again exiled from his native state, he declared in March 1849 his intention to go to gold-rush California, the one place at midcentury that seemed to offer an open field, even to a man of color.
Intrepidly researched and grippingly told, Virgil Bennehan's story reveals the complexity and fragility of human relationships within bondage. Once liberated, Bennehan led a tumultuous life that dramatized the fleeting promise and pervasive limits of Black freedom in the era of slavery—and foreshadowed the future for generations that followed.
Intrepidly researched and grippingly told, Virgil Bennehan's story reveals the complexity and fragility of human relationships within bondage. Once liberated, Bennehan led a tumultuous life that dramatized the fleeting promise and pervasive limits of Black freedom in the era of slavery—and foreshadowed the future for generations that followed.
Sydney Nathans is emeritus professor of history at Duke University.
