Stolen
Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home
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3.9 • 8개의 평가
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- US$14.99
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This “superbly researched and engaging” (The Wall Street Journal) true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice belongs “alongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrison” (Jane Kamensky, Professor of American History at Harvard University).
Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.
Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.
“Rigorously researched, heartfelt, and dramatically concise, Bell’s investigation illuminates the role slavery played in the systemic inequalities that still confront Black Americans” (Booklist).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Maryland professor Bell (We Shall Be No More) uncovers the history of the Reverse Underground Railroad in this moving account of five African-American boys kidnapped from Philadelphia and sold into slavery in 1825. According to Bell, "child snatching was frequent, pernicious, and politically significant" in the decades after Congress banned slave imports from Africa and the Caribbean in 1808. After being kidnapped, the boys were forced to make a 1,000-mile trek to the slave markets of Natchez, Miss. Along the way, 10-year-old Cornelius Sinclair was sold to an Alabama cotton planter, and the kidnappers beat another boy to death. In Rocky Springs, Miss., 15-year-old Sam Scomp convinced a plantation owner that he and the others had been abducted, setting into motion a series of legal battles that, Bell argues, culminated in the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which "put the country on a collision course with civil war." Drawing from a wealth of archival materials, Bell paints a harrowing picture of this human trafficking network and the "tens of thousands of free black people" it ensnared. The result is a scholarly work that tells a powerful human interest story.
