Loren Schweninger. Appealing for Liberty: Freedom Suits in the South.

Abstract

In a 1929 interview, Mr. Reed, who had been born enslaved in Tennessee, admonished his Fisk University examiner that in order to properly research and write African American history, “you will have to get [it] from somebody who wore the shoe, and by and by from one to the other, you will get a book” (quoted in Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Ex-Slaves [1945], 45–46). Recent groundbreaking work in the field of legal history demonstrates that even ninety years later, vast collections of sources illuminating the voices and lived realities of those “who wore the shoe” are as untapped as they are revelatory. Loren Schweninger’s Appealing for Liberty: Freedom Suits in the South, a painstakingly researched examination of freedom suits across the American South from the Revolutionary era into the Civil War, joins monographs by Kelly Kennington, Kimberly M. Welch, Melissa Milewski, and others in connecting us to the everyday “fears, anxieties, anticipations, and dreams” of enslaved individuals who navigated varying and ever-evolving legal systems in pursuit of liberty, family, and dignity (289). Non–legal historians take notice: your colleagues’ exploration of southern law—and its creative local use by African Americans and their attorneys—is revealing thousands of new “narratives” tucked away in moldy bundles of depositions, petitions, loose papers, and chancery files that help to depict more complete and nuanced pictures of enslaved people’s experiences than ever before.