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List of contents
- Prologue
- Part I - The Worst Slave of Them All
- Chapter 1: The Crossing
- Chapter 2: Touseytown
- Chapter 3: Down River
- Chapter 4: Ward's Return
- Chapter 5: Cincinnati
- Chapter 6: The Plan
- Chapter 7: The Flight
- Part II - Forks of the Road
- Chapter 8: Raising a Muss
- Chapter 9: Wood versus Ward
- Chapter 10: The Keeper
- Chapter 11: Natchez
- Chapter 12: Brandon Hall
- Chapter 13: Versailles
- Chapter 14: Revolution
- Chapter 15: The March
- Part III - The Return of Henrietta Wood
- Chapter 16: Arthur
- Chapter 17: Robertson County
- Chapter 18: Dawn and Doom
- Chapter 19: Nashville
- Chapter 20: A Rather Interesting Case
- Chapter 21: Story of a Slave
- Chapter 22: The Verdict
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgements
- Appendix: An Essay on Sources
- Notes
- Index
About the author
W. Caleb McDaniel is Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities and Professor and Chair of the History Department at Rice University. His website is wcaleb.org and he can be found on Twitter at @wcaleb.
Summary
The unforgettable saga of one enslaved woman's fight for justice--and reparations
Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position.
By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: in 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500. The decision stuck on appeal. More important than the amount, though the largest ever awarded by an American court in restitution for slavery, was the fact that any money was awarded at all. By the time the case was decided, Ward had become a wealthy businessman and a pioneer of convict leasing in the South. Wood's son later became a prominent Chicago lawyer, and she went on to live until 1912.
McDaniel's book is an epic tale of a black woman who survived slavery twice and who achieved more than merely a moral victory over one of her oppressors. Above all,Sweet Taste of Libertyis a portrait of an extraordinary individual as well as a searing reminder of the lessons of her story, which establish beyond question the connections between slavery and the prison system that rose in its place.
