Question of Freedom
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A01=William G. Thomas
american slave trade
archival sources
Author_William G. Thomas
Category=LAZ
Category=NHK
Category=NHTS
Category=WQH
cotton plantation
DC
edward queen
emancipation
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
francis scott key
freedom suits
georgetown slave sale
jesuit
legal challenge
maryland
plantation owner
post-revolutionary era
prince george's county
reparations
slave holder
sugar plantation
supreme court argument
washington
Product details
- ISBN 9780300261509
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 22 Feb 2022
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Winner of the Mark Lynton Prize in History—the story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history
"A rich, roiling history that Thomas recounts with eloquence and skill. . . . The very existence of freedom suits assumed that slavery could only be circumscribed and local; what Thomas shows in his illuminating book is how this view was eventually turned upside down in decisions like Dred Scott. 'Freedom was local,' Thomas writes. 'Slavery was national.'"—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"Gripping. . . . Profound and prodigiously researched."—Alison L. LaCroix, Washington Post
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.
"A rich, roiling history that Thomas recounts with eloquence and skill. . . . The very existence of freedom suits assumed that slavery could only be circumscribed and local; what Thomas shows in his illuminating book is how this view was eventually turned upside down in decisions like Dred Scott. 'Freedom was local,' Thomas writes. 'Slavery was national.'"—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"Gripping. . . . Profound and prodigiously researched."—Alison L. LaCroix, Washington Post
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.
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.
