Adam Rothman, Beyond Freedom’s Reach: a kidnapping in the twilight of slavery

The readings of the past few weeks have touched upon the agency of slaves, former slaves, and free people of color. Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage and Stephen Kantrowitz’s More than Freedom both explore the ways in which people of color were able to challenge the norms that were expected of them. They pushed back on the legal system and social norms in order to negotiate transforming power relations with their white “superiors.” Adam Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach explores similar themes of slave agency and power relations through the life of an enslaved woman, Rose Herera.

Rose was a southern slave whose life was turned upside down by the arrival of the Civil War. She was owned by immigrants Mary and James De Hart in New Orleans, LA, a city closely linked with its island neighbor, Cuba. After the Union troops asserted their control over New Orleans, James fled to Havana, Cuba with plans for his wife and children to quickly follow suit. In the interim Rose was thrown in jail for an alleged assault against Mary’s aunt, Mrs. Roland. Mary was making plans to join her husband in Cuba and was adamantly trying to convince Rose to move with her family. Mary visited Rose several times in jail hoping to convince her to move to Cuba with her three young children but Rose refused. With Union troops in New Orleans, Mary knew that Rose could not be taken against her will but began making threats that she would take Rose’s children. Eventually, Mary received permission to take Rose’s children to Cuba and made good on her threat.

Beyond Freedom’s Reach then details the trials and tribulations that Rose faced in trying to get her kidnapped children back from the De Hart’s. Rothman contends, Rose was a southern slave who “wrote her own script”—she refused to be a passive bystander while her children were taken away from her unjustly (2). Her story demonstrates that “the overthrow of slavery was not linear, orderly, or peaceful . . . rather, it was chaotic, improvised and violent” (7). It was greatly contingent upon local conditions and was never simply black and white—there were many blurry gray areas in the political, legal, and social struggle that would unravel throughout the war and afterwards.

Rothman’s use of sources to reconstruct this microhistory is fascinating for the ways that he compensates for what the sources leave to the imagination. Rose’s story is primarily reconstructed through the multiplicity of legal documents detailing her case against Mary De Hart for kidnapping. However, the reader rarely gets a sense for Rose’s experience through Rose’s own words; her voice is nearly always filtered through her lawyers. Rothman often draws on other comparable stories that may or may not help fill the gaps. I liked this at times and disliked it at others, mostly because I wanted to know about Rose’s particular experience. Unfortunately, one seldom has the luxury of an abundance of sources and first-hand narratives when it comes to slave or former slave histories. Rothman’s creativity in using Rose’s legal sources and supplementing them with other similar microhistories is ultimately successful in humanizing the history of slavery and emancipation in the United States.