In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and co-author of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic. Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and...

In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna's case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate-about care as a "mere voluntary courtesy"-became routine in a wide range...

Many of the unsung heroes of the Underground Railroad lived and worked in Washington, D.C. Men and women, black and white, operatives and freedom seekers-all demonstrated courage, resourcefulness and initiative. Leonard Grimes, a free African American, was arrested for transporting enslaved people to freedom. John Dean, a white lawyer, used the District courts to test the legality of the Fugitive Slave Act. Anna Maria Weems dressed as a boy in order...

Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this industrializing process was slave labor. “Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom” tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block. Calvin Schermerhorn argues that the African American...

This is the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations. Using diaries, court records, legal documents, books, paintings, photographs, and oral histories, From Slave Ship to Harvard traces a family-from the colonial period and the American Revolution through the Civil War to Harvard and finally today-forming a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement. Yarrow Mamout was an educated Muslim from Guinea, brought...

The Town of Chester in upstate Warren County, New York, was a secret haven for runaway slaves escaping to Canada along the Underground Railroad. The small Adirondack town holds as many as nine confirmed or suspected sites where fugitives once found shelter. Stories abound of residents discovering secret rooms containing beds and other artifacts within their homes. The first abolitionist pastor of the Darrowsville Wesleyan Church, Reverend Thomas Baker,...

Explores the long-neglected rural dimensions of northern slavery and emancipation in New York's Mid-Hudson Valley. Slavery and Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley focuses on the largely forgotten history of slavery in New York and the African American freedom struggle in the central Hudson Valley prior to the Civil War. Slaves were central actors in the drama that unfolded in the region during the Revolution, and they waged a long and bitter battle...