Rose, a Woman of Colour

This book is the true story of Rose Gatliff, a slave who used the courts of Kentucky to wrest freedom from those who held her family in bondage. Despite being held in a slave State and despite her rights being judged by white, slaveholding men, she prevailed. Her persistence, determination and intelligence made her, as one witness phrased it, "the best lawyer" her family had.

This is also the story of the witnesses for and against Rose, all white, who speak to us in their own words, taken from case documents in the State Archives of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Follow Rose as she is taken from her mother in Virginia to Kentucky and passed from Master to Master until 1833, when she began a legal process covering four States, multiple Kentucky counties, four trials, an appeal and nearly nineteen years and see why her descendants should be proud of her.