But arguably the most pervasive—and least appreciated—fact of un-enslaved black life was the constant fear of being re-enslaved. Even for those with freedom papers, one had to always be vigilant. You never quite knew if that genial white man or woman, or their occasional black accomplice, was honestly offering you a job you desperately needed, or if they were setting you up for a trap. In August 1825, Sam Scomp, a 15-year-old runaway slave, learned the hard way. He was in Philadelphia for only a week, having just escaped from his New Jersey plantation, when a black man approached him with a job. If Scomp helped him haul fruit to the city’s dockyards, he could make enough money to buy a meal. When the two made it to the small vessel that had arranged to buy the fruit, three white men offered Scomp a drink below deck. Tired and thirsty, Scomp accepted. But almost as soon as he walked on board, the men stuffed a rag into his month, tied his hands behind his back, and threw him beneath the hull. There, he found two other black boys—Enos Tilghman, ten, born un-enslaved, and Alex Manlove, eight, also born un-enslaved. Over the next few weeks, the kidnappers picked up two more black boys and two black women, and sold them all into slavery.
The stories of these black boys, and several black women, are at the center of two extraordinary new books. Stolen, by Richard Bell, a historian at the University of Maryland, tells the story of Sam Scomp and the four other un-enslaved black boys with whom he was illegally sold into slavery, while Sweet Taste of Liberty, by W. Caleb McDaniel, a historian at Rice, focuses on the remarkable life of Henrietta Wood. Like the five boys of Bell’s account, Wood was kidnapped and illegally sold into slavery. And like them, she would spend years seeking justice, in her case suing for and winning a considerable sum from her illegal enslaver, a payment McDaniel likens to a form of reparations.
None of the people in these books is well-known, even to historians. They left almost none of their own papers; most of them could not write. Yet through painstaking archival research, Bell and McDaniel have reconstructed their lives with such vivid detail, sensitivity, and riveting storytelling that you would think each of their figures left us whole autobiographies. For the simple act of recovering their stories, both books would be commendable. But what makes them essential reading is the larger questions they demand of us as readers: What exactly was the condition under which un-enslaved black people lived before emancipation—and what is it that they and their descendants are owed?