Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel (review)

On June 3, 1870, Henrietta Wood petitioned a Cincinnati, Ohio, court for $20,000 in damages from Zebulon Ward, a prominent Arkansas entrepreneur. This was an extraordinary sum, to be sure, but scarcely fair recompense for the outrages Wood alleged. Nearly twenty years earlier, she claimed, Ward and others had conspired to “deprive” her “of her liberty, and to convey and sell her into slavery for life, for gain and profit” (198). When Ward and his associates kidnapped Wood, they inaugurated an odyssey that took her from Ohio to Kentucky, Mississippi, Texas, and back, to be followed by a running fight through the intricacies of the American legal system. In the end, Wood achieved something few others ever would: she became one of a shockingly small number of former slaves who received any compensation for their enslavement. In this stunning and moving work of historical recovery, executed through the meticulous examination of court records, enslavers’ papers, and a host of other sources (which he uses to corroborate Wood’s accounts of her experiences), W. Caleb McDaniel offers a virtually unique narrative of resilience and restitution. In his capable hands, Wood’s story provides an intimate window into the myriad worlds of antebellum slavery, the long afterlives of that institution, and the struggle required to attain even a modicum of justice.

When Henrietta Wood filed suit against Ward, she did so fully aware of the many ways enslavers wrung wealth from their human property. Born into slavery in Kentucky during the late 1810s, Wood endured multiple sales before the age of twenty, including a trip to the epicenter of American slave capitalism, New Orleans, in the hands of one enslaver: William Cirode. Cirode’s wife carried her back to the Ohio River valley, where she exploited Wood’s labor for several more years before legally freeing her in Cincinnati in 1848. Cash-strapped members of the Cirode clan, however, refused to accept Wood’s liberation, seeing in her a form of financial relief. With Ward’s help, they kidnapped her and sold her to a Lexington slave trader; when a lawsuit failed to secure her freedom, Wood joined the thousands of men, women, and children sold annually to Cotton Kingdom planters. Natchez’s Gerard Brandon purchased her, and for the next eight years she picked and processed the cotton that made the region one of the nation’s wealthiest. When the Civil War threatened Brandon’s enterprise, he drove Wood; her young son, Arthur; and hundreds of other slaves to Texas, seeking to forestall their emancipation and to preserve his investment in them.

This gambit ultimately failed, but true freedom remained elusive. For four years after the war, Wood remained enslaved in all but name, working Brandon’s Texas and Mississippi lands for wages that never came. Finally seizing the freedom of mobility, in 1869 she took Arthur back to Cincinnati. There, abetted by a prominent lawyer, Harvey Myers, who also employed her, she launched a suit against the man she deemed responsible for her renewed captivity: Zebulon Ward. Wood’s motivations for embarking on this litigation remain opaque. Perhaps she had contemplated recompense from the moment of her sale. Perhaps her straitened circumstances made the prospect of a windfall appealing. Perhaps her Republican-leaning employer urged her onward. Regardless of her reasoning, Wood’s efforts embodied American slaves’ pursuit of justice for their captivity—and the hurdles they faced in doing so. Even armed with a favorable set of facts, life circumstances, and legal claim, it took nearly a decade of navigating a labyrinth of procedural obstacles and unending appeals to bring Ward to heel. Finally, in 1879, a terminal ruling against Ward compelled him to pay— but only an eighth of what Wood had originally sought. Wood kept her feelings about this circumscribed justice largely to herself, but its results demonstrated the possibilities inherent in...