Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman (review)

Adam Rothman weaves together an incisive narrative of slavery, freedom, and family in wartime Louisiana. This book delineates “Rose Herera’s world of slavery, the kidnapping of her children during the Civil War, and her remarkable effort to get them back” (p. 4). As a petite histoire of one family’s ordeal, Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery provides a lens on the ways Herera triumphed over the tragedy of slavery. This deeply researched and engaging study is based on a petition Rose Herera submitted to the United States Congress on March 4, 1865. From this petition, Rothman reconstructs Herera’s world and offers an intimate portrait of her lived experiences.

Beyond Freedom’s Reach gives voice to the untold men, women, and children who were kidnapped during the chaos of wartime emancipation and brought to Cuba. The five chapters of this study illustrate the centrality of Rose Herera’s agency in a domestic conflict that transcended national borders. With great originality and verve, Rothman interrogates a range of topics such as the domestic slave trade, identity politics, mobility, slave marriages, and international politics.

Rose Herera was born in Pointe Coupée Parish in Louisiana. Sugar planter Octave Leblanc brought her to New Orleans in 1853 to work as a domestic slave when he sold his plantation. In 1861 James Andrew De Hart, a New Orleans dentist, purchased Herera, who had already been sold three times since her arrival in New Orleans. At the time De Hart purchased Herera, she had two children: Ernest, age four years, and Marie, age two. After her sale to De Hart, Herera gave birth to Josephine. Rose’s husband and the father of her children, George Herera, was a free man of color who worked as a painter in New Orleans with his father. According to Rose Herera, their marriage took place at the cathedral in New Orleans in 1859 or 1860. Between 1857 and 1864, Rose and George had five children together.

The Union capture of New Orleans in 1862 led James De Hart to cast his fortunes in Cuba. De Hart arrived in Havana in November 1862 and set up his dental practice. His wife, Mary De Hart, remained in New Orleans with Herera and her children but had plans to join him. Rose Herera and her children were valuable to Mary De Hart. “Herera’s labor relieved Mary De Hart of the burdens of housework . . . . If the De Harts needed money, they [Rose’s children] could be hired out or sold” (p. 101). Herera objected to the move to Havana. She made this clear “when she petitioned the government for the arrest of Mary De Hart and the return of the children” (pp. 101-2). According to Rothman, “As slavery fell apart in New Orleans, Herera dared to assert her own identity as something other than her owner’s property and servant. She was a wife, a daughter, a friend. These human ties of family and community endured within slavery and emerged as slavery receded” (p. 102).

Scholars of slavery and emancipation will find this study essential to delineating the efforts of slave owners to hold on to their property as slavery collapsed during the Civil War. Herera’s story underscores the “disruptive impact of the Civil War on enslaved people who were uprooted from their homes and severed from their families” (pp. 188-89). This study emphasizes the critical role played by African American women in transforming the meaning of freedom in the wartime and postwar South.