Reviewed by: A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil Warby William G. Thomas III Ted Maris-Wolf (bio) Slavery, Antislavery, Abolition, Legal history 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, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 418. Cloth, $35.00.) [End Page 156]Rarely have white historians of slavery sought relationships with descendants of those enslaved by their very own ancestors, let alone authored a scholarly monograph detailing the horrors of slaveholding and violence in their family history. William Thomas has done both. The resulting study, A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War, is an ambitious and meticulously researched examination of slavery and law between the Revolution and the Civil War, as well as an unconventional and provocative call for historians to lead the way in fostering truth and racial reconciliation in today's society. Thomas challenges readers (especially those of us descended from enslavers) to reflect on our own relationships to the private and public pasts we inherit, study, and narrate. Are we open to hearing and acting on the calls of those enslaved by our own family members? Reckoning with revelations uncovered during the course of his research, Thomas asks, "How would I respond to the call of these ancestors? How would you?" (121). Thomas's unorthodox use of first-, second-, and third-person voice likely will inspire more scholars to follow his example (and that of others before him, including Saidiya Hartman, Edward Ball, and Thomas Norman DeWolf) in crafting more intimate historical explorations of the lives of the enslaved. Perhaps A Question of Freedomwill even precipitate the long-awaited moment when we historians of slavery acknowledge greater kinship with our cousins in anthropology by explicitly positioning ourselves (and our personal histories) to the subjects and people we study—something anthropologists have been doing for decades. It is just as likely, however, that Thomas's approach will alienate some who see his first-person interludes of "self-revelation" and attempts at racial reconciliation as distracting, overly personal, or even insulting, especially if they find these passages obscure the individuals at the center of the study—enslaved Black men and women who took the extraordinary step of petitioning for their freedom and challenging the very basis of legal slavery in Maryland, Washington, DC, and elsewhere (2). After all, must we be privy to the private ruminations and emotional journeys of the historian to appreciate brilliant scholarship? Thomas's bold narrative approach is reason enough to assign A Question of Freedomin any graduate seminar, but his remarkable archival detective work and resulting contributions make this one of the most [End Page 157]important recent works in legal history and, more broadly, the history of American slavery. Thomas recounts in painstaking detail the efforts of five generations of enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, to secure their freedom and that of others by directing white lawyers to file hundreds of freedom suits on their behalf in various courts—county, state, even the U.S. Supreme Court. Through their personal involvement in the conception of these suits, the Queens, Mahoneys, Bells, and other enslaved families "accumulated a substantial reservoir of legal experience and knowledge" that not only secured freedom for many of their own petitioners between 1787 and 1861 but also rattled the foundations of the institution of slavery in Maryland and beyond (149). One of Thomas's most important contributions is advancing our understanding of an increasingly robust Black legal culture between the Revolution and the Civil War and the role of enslaved petitioners and their freedom suits in fostering this tradition. Thomas recounts the complicated situations of dozens of petitioners who creatively, persistently, and often repeatedly challenged the property claims of their enslavers through law. In several early suits in Maryland, enslaved families evoked the Somersetv. Stewartruling of 1772 to argue that because an ancestor of theirs had set foot in England, they and all descendants were free, according to English common law...