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The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history 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.
These volumes, the fourth and fifth, complete the series of biographical sketches of students at Princeton University (the College of New Jersey in colonial times). They cover pivotal years for both the nation and the College. In 1784, the war with England had just ended. Nassau Hall was still in a shambles following its bombardment, and the College was in financial distress. It gradually regained financial and academic strength, and the Class of 1794 graduated in the year of the death of President John Witherspoon, one of the most important early American educators. The introductory essay by John Murrin, editor of the series since 1981, explores the postwar context of the College. The two v...
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