A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas III

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Reviewed by: A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas III Kimberly Welch (bio) A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War. By William G. Thomas III. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 432. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $25.00.) The Butlers, Bells, Mahoneys, Queens, and Shorters. Over the course of five generations, members of these (and other) enslaved families lodged hundreds of lawsuits for their freedom in the courts of Prince George’s County, Maryland. Their suits named as defendants many of the region’s most powerful and wealthiest enslavers; involved the Jesuit slaveholders’ sale of 272 men, women, and children, which directly benefited Georgetown College (now University); engaged the services of such prominent attorneys as Francis Scott Key; pulled together witness testimony and documentary evidence that traversed oceans and time; demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of law and the ever-changing political [End Page 264] terrain; reached the highest court of the land; and embodied the struggle over slavery in the new nation. Many found success in court, such as the descendants of indentured servant Eleanor “Irish Nell” Butler, who, in the 1790s, sued on the grounds of white ancestry. Yet even those who lost contested the notion that people could be held as property and forced their opponents to redouble their efforts to enshrine slavery into settled law. Such is the topic of William G. Thomas’s book, A Question of Freedom. Through a microhistorical, “situational approach” (329n10), Thomas dives deep into the lives of these enslaved families, the circumstances that brought them to court to seek legal freedom, and the social, political, legal, and geographical context that framed their experiences. Freedom suits, Thomas argues, served as “a public counterpart of the Underground Railroad,” a space where these enslaved families “waged a desperate battle over freedom through the law” (9). In response, slaveholders used the courts to ensure their right to hold people as property. And in the process, Thomas argues, both the enslavers and the enslaved demonstrated the fundamental instability of slavery in American law and constitutionalism. This saga, moreover, involved Thomas’s slaveholding ancestors, forcing him to confront the legacy of slavery in his own life and for his family. The result is a meticulously researched book that gives voice to a multitude of people who, for nearly one hundred years, challenged slavery’s very foundation in law. For legal historians of slavery in the Americas—particularly those who have written extensively on freedom suits and the engagement of the legal system by people of African descent—the world of law described in this book will be familiar. Indeed, a rich body of scholarship covers much of the same terrain: the grounds upon which the enslaved rested their claims (such as ancestry, free-soil principles, or manumission by will); the varying and often contradictory decisions made by the judiciary, both local and appellate; the anxieties of the slaveholding defendants and their increasing efforts to solidify slavery in law or otherwise; the deepening commitment to racial subordination and white property; the closing of escape hatches to freedom; and the question of the rights, if any, of the enslaved under the Constitution. This scholarship, which investigates freedom suits and personal status disputes, is also decidedly transnational and rife with cross-field conversations about jurisdiction, comparison, and divergence. Thomas cites much of this literature; however, by not fully engaging with the scholarship’s arguments and findings, he misses an opportunity to place the Maryland freedom suits and the forces at work in that region into a broader conversation about the law of slavery and freedom occurring simultaneously across the country and in the Atlantic world. How, for [End Page 265] instance, should we think about the similar appeals to natural and human rights made by the enslaved in Maryland and those made by enslaved litigants throughout Spanish America at roughly the same moment, as detailed by Bianca Premo in her groundbreaking The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (2017)? What is the role of Francis Scott Key’s arguments...

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