Slavery on Trial - based on Beyond Freedom's Reach by Adam Rothman (2015)

Adam Rothman's Beyond Freedom's Reach: a Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (2015) is a circuitous telling of the era surrounding Emancipation when black Americans were particularly susceptible to becoming victims of kidnapping, as slave owners desperately tried to maintain their way of life. As the new social order took form in the South, the planter class fled to U.S. states and territories with inconsistent oversight and "slave havens" in the Caribbean. In this book, Rothman tells the story of Rose Herera, a domestic slave in Louisiana whose family straddles slavery and freedom, while being torn apart by slavery and freedom.

Telling a female slave's story 150 years after Reconstruction is a formidable feat, but Rothman had two factors working in his favor. First, he was fortunate to stumble across an incredible primary source: an 1866 report to the Secretary of State presented to the U.S. Senate on the "kidnapping of colored persons in the southern states for the purpose of selling them as slaves in Cuba.' This source is unique in its specificity and in its championing of certain universal human rights during this time. Through Rose's story, Rothman can highlight an important but relatively unknown international conspiracy to preserve the institution of slavery and its profits, while simultaneously utilizing the technique of microhistory. This historiographical method of writing focuses on the experiences of a single person or household in order to discover "new insights into how people actually lived" (6). In the end notes to the prologue, Rothman writes that the microhistory was "pioneered by social historians of early modern Europe" (End note 8, for pp. 3-7). In providing the reader swatches of Rose's life as a mother, wife, activist, woman and yes, a slave, he successfully executes her microhistory with brevity and completeness.

Using a court case as a primary source advances the impact of this book. It demonstrates the gravity of the trend of black kidnappings (and rumors of such) and the social and legal volatility of the day. Rothman often writes that the era of Emancipation was unevenly distributed across geography and circumstance. "...the forward march of freedom was erratic and could be reversed" (163). Were it not for this court case documented in Congressional hearings, her story and others like it may have succumbed to simply being rumors and not the impetus for Federal action.

Another simplification Rothman sidesteps is the reduction of Rose Herera's life to that of her status as a slave. Rather, he tells Rose's history as conditioned by the institution of slavery. The ultimate effect is that at the culmination of the narrative, "as a moral drama, nothing less than slavery itself was on trial" (137). It is to be noted that if Rose's agency was ever circumscribed by her circumstance, Rothman's microhistory is no evidence of that. As a slave, she chooses to marry a free man of color, George Herera. Together, they father 5 children. The eldest three are the precious cargo that is spirited (illegally) away by a Mrs Mary De Hart. By law, Rose was property of the De Hart family, as were her children. Although George was free, Rose and her children were not. In making slavery hereditary through the mother, Southern planter aristocrats were able to maintain profits by claiming the mother's offspring into perpetuity, rather than facing extralegal and exorbitant charges for human trafficking and import. Laws such as this provide a valuable framework for Rothman's text. As the rights of black Americans were in flux, so was the nation, and the speed and conclusion of Rose's plight is proof of that.

George Herera's agency is difficult to ascertain. By law and custom, the paternity of the Herera children was stricken from baptismal records, furthering the pro-slavery ideology that slave owners were symbolic and absolute providers for their slaves, and thus, the father figure. George could not live with Rose. George could not stop Rose from being imprisoned, nor was he able to resist Mrs De Hart's abduction of their three eldest children to Cuba. But he does push back mightily against the notion that slave families were creations of their masters. By owning the slave legally as a commodity, taking authority as a parent would, and disciplining with only one's conscience as oversight, the slave owner believed that all relationships the slave had were also manifestations of the owner. However in 1863, George pens a letter to the highest-ranking Union official in New Orleans informing the Major General that his wife is imprisoned and his children were in danger of being kidnapped by their owner (then, a Mrs Roland, Mary De Hart's aunt and the Hereras' owner, on paper). Rothman writes that George tied "his family's (my emphasis) plight to transcendent principles of right and wrong. Rose and her children may have belonged to her owner as property, but they also belonged to him, and the mother and children belonged together" (110). Rothman further notes that Herera signed the letter in his own name, indicating he was literate, the words were his own, and the agency was his own.

Finally we can look examine the negotiation and power struggle between Mary De Hart and Rose Herera. Compared to the intensely and frequently violent abuse that took place between the domestic slaves and their mistresses in the book we read last week, Rothman's female leads are confronting Emancipation in a different place under very different circumstance. The prolonged discipline that Rose receives in light of her agency is at the hands of local jailer, after her arrest for allegedly assaulting her owner, Mrs Roland. That she was jailed and not beaten - or worse - is one deviation from Glymph's text. In 1865, Rose denied Mrs Roland's charges in provost court (102), which may have been deemed "sassy" or "insolent" as in Glymph's history, but to deny an owner in court is evidence of the asymmetry of Emancipation across time and space. Another interesting diversion from last week novel is that black people can - for the first time - testify against white people. This uniform application of rights brings into focus the "many civil wars" of New Orleans that were being waged in the "twilight of slavery." In an even more intriguing development of Emancipation, Rose presses charges against De Hart after she's spirited the children to Cuba and returned to Louisiana. Now a freed woman, she requests her lawyer to arrange for her former mistress' arrest and detainment on charges of kidnapping. In what can only be described as an amazingly short amount of time and courageous amount of agency, Rose is able to find recourse for her children against her former owner in the throes of the legal system.

The characterizations that Rothman tackles challenge the supposed perimeters of citizenship, freedom, race, class, gender and right. Their individual stories help shed light on the gray areas they waded through in the legal and social landscapes of the emancipated South.


~ dls