Sweet Taste Of Liberty

Sweet Taste Of Liberty, by W. Caleb McDaniel, which won a Pulitzer Prize this year, is the remarkable story of Henrietta Wood. born into slavery., then freed by her owner, only to be kidnapped  back into slavery. She was free again after the Civil War and decided to sue the man who kidnapped and sold her, Zebulon Ward. Amazingly in court with a white jury and judge, she won. She didn't get nearly as much as she wanted, but the money remains the highest amount ever won for restitution for slavery.

Wood was living free in Cincinnati when the woman she worked for (who was undoubtedly in on it) asked her to accompany her on a carriage ride that led to Kentucky, where she was abducted. She was sold down the river to Natchez, Mississippi, and when the war started her owner took all his slaves to Texas, so they would not be confiscated. 

Wood had sued Kentucky for her freedom in the 1850s, but lost. Starting in 1870, with the help of sympathetic lawyers, her case was being heard by the Southern District of Ohio. Due to stalling tactics by Ward and incorrectly filed paperwork, the case didn't go to trial until 1879, when Wood was about sixty years old (she never knew her actual age, nor could she read and write). Astonishingly, she won $2500, far less than the $20,000 in lost wages that she claimed she could have earned in the thirteen years she was improperly enslaved.

Ward joked that he was the last man to pay for a slave: "The true story, the one that Ward did not want to tell, was that of a black woman who survived enslavement twice—and then made a powerful white man pay." He was a scoundrel, who operated prisons in three different states, making money by leasing black prisoners for labor. After slavery ended, their was a new kind of slavery, where black men were given long sentences for minor crimes, if they were even guilty in the first place: "The Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery made an exception for involuntary servitude imposed as punishment for crime. Southern states took full advantage of that loophole by crowding their prisons with black prisoners."

McDaniel leaves Wood's story often to give a larger picture of slavery. He notes that Kentucky, which never did secede from the Union, nonetheless loved slavery. They didn't ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1976. Toward the end of the book, when the trial is discussed there are so many details, such as the instructions given to the jury and the decision by a second judge not to grant a new trial, that it can make one's head swim. But these are necessary details, and McDaniel does his best to make them understood.

The biggest takeaway is that Wood was a remarkable women, who was largely lost to history, so this is a worthy volume to bring her pack to prominence.