A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War

The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history

“A revelatory and fluidly written chronicle. . . . An essential account of an overlooked chapter in the history of American slavery."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A work of remarkable honesty and humanity that should inform any conversation on the legacy of slavery. Please read it."—Lauret Savoy, author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the America Landscape and a descendant of freedom petitioners

For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital.

Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.