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Reviewed by:
  • Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman
  • Richard Bell (bio)
Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery. By Adam Rothman. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 288. Cloth, $29.95.)

Rose Herera refused. For a week or more in December 1862, her mistress had been trying to persuade Herera to consent to join her three children on a one-way voyage to meet their master, a New Orleans dentist, [End Page 295] who had sought asylum in Cuba, “one of the last bastions of slavery in the Americas” (3). Herera repeatedly refused, pledging to stay put and begging Mary De Hart to leave Joseph Ernest, Marie Georgiana, and Marie Josephine with her in New Orleans. Determined to take these enslaved children to Havana with or without their mother, De Hart had no intention of unburdening herself of three of her family’s most valuable capital assets. So, on January 15, 1863, as news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the Crescent City, De Hart hustled Herera’s children aboard a steamer bound for its sister city, Havana, in search of sanctuary in a slave society far beyond freedom’s reach.

Herera’s anguished defiance sets in motion the extraordinary sequence of events at the heart of Adam Rothman’s brisk and engrossing new book. A transnational microhistory that seeks to humanize, dramatize, and complicate the familiar narrative of Civil War emancipation, Beyond Freedom’s Reach transports readers from Pointe Coupée, the upriver Louisiana parish in which Rose Herera was born in the 1830s, to the site of this new mother’s sale into the De Harts’ domestic service in antebellum New Orleans, and then across the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba, where her children languished for more than two years. During that exile, their father, a free black housepainter named George Herera, died while slavery tottered and then finally collapsed both in New Orleans and across the South, rendering Rose a free woman.

Rose Herera spent the early months of 1865 advancing a suit through the New Orleans courts to force Mary De Hart to return her “kidnapped” offspring. Guile and good timing conspired so that Herera’s case eventually came before a military tribunal adjudicated by Nathaniel Banks. In his profoundly ironic ruling, the Union army’s commander of the Department of the Gulf found De Hart guilty of having violated Louisiana’s long-standing slave code by “improperly and unlawfully separating the children of less than ten years of age from the mother” (149). The following spring, after some arm-twisting by the U.S. consul general in Havana, Mary De Hart finally returned the Herera children to New Orleans to be reunited with their mother. Fourteen years later, the next time Rose Herera appeared in the federal census, her once-fractured family could be found living together under a single roof, “a small testament to the profound difference between slavery and freedom” (185).

Primary sources by or about the Hereras are in short supply; limited to Rose’s petition, other court documents, government correspondence about the case, and a few other bits and bobs. Still, in the early chapters of this family saga, Rothman ably bridges the evidentiary gaps. He evocatively reconstructs the world of Pointe Coupée using French-language [End Page 296] baptismal records, memoirs by survivors of slavery, novels, land records, and the census. Likewise, he brings to life Rose’s experiences in prewar New Orleans—a place where she was bought and sold at least four times between 1857 and 1861—via the city’s notarial records (“a paper trail of tears” [31]), visitor accounts, a slaveholder’s diary, a passport application, city directories, and newspaper ads for slaves and for dentists. By contrast, the world of sugar and slavery across the Gulf in Cuba is, unfortunately, a little harder to distinguish. Rothman’s description of the lives of the three Herera children during their two years with the De Harts in Havana seems thin by comparison with the richly textured yet extraordinarily economical reconstruction work so evident earlier in the book.

That reservation aside, Beyond Freedom’s Reach...

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