The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history, in which a number of enslaved families challenged their bondage in court

"There are many controversies and chronic misconceptions surrounding the idea of emancipation in the nineteenth-century United States. Much recent scholarship has sought to address these misconceptions ... Reidy further enriches and complicates our understanding of emancipation in the context of the Civil War. Drawing us back to testimonies of participants and contemporary witnesses of the era and synthesizing the perspectives of subsequent observers,...

"In January 1785, a young African American slave named Elizabeth was put on board the Lucretia in New York Harbor, bound for Charleston, where she would be sold to her fifth master in just 22 years. Leaving behind a small child she had little hope of ever seeing again, Elizabeth was faced with the stark reality of being sold south to a life quite different from any she had known before. She had no idea that Robert Townsend, a son of the family she...