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The following review appeared in the August 2016 issue of CHOICE. The review is for your internal use only. Please review our Permission and Reprints Guidelines or email permissions@ala-choice.org.
Social & Behavioral Sciences
History, Geography & Area Studies - North America
Fiske (independent scholar) and Maddox (emer., English and American studies, Georgetown) focus on the kidnapping of free blacks in the pre–Civil War North, illuminating a little-known but tragic aspect of antebellum US history. Both authors include information on race relations in the North, contentious relationships between free and slave states, and federal and state laws pertinent to slavery and kidnapping. Maddox focuses on a notorious slave catcher and kidnapper, Thomas McCreary of Maryland, and two of his victims, Rachel and Elizabeth Parker, residents of Pennsylvania. Both women worked as servants for white farmers when McCreary and an accomplice kidnapped them in 1851. Maddox demonstrates that the resulting furor can mostly be attributed to Northern reactions to the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the acrimony between Maryland and Pennsylvania over fugitive slaves and the kidnapping of free African Americans. The sisters obtained their freedom in 1853 but not before spending months in a Baltimore jail while their cases were adjudicated in court. McCreary managed to elude conviction in his kidnapping trial and died in 1870.
Retired librarian Fiske, coauthor of Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave (2013), deals with topics such as methods kidnappers of African Americans employed, interactions between kidnappers and slave traders, reactions of the North and the South to kidnapping, and the treatment of kidnapped African Americans. A final chapter offers case studies of numerous kidnappings that took place throughout the free states. Although the book is short, the information is enlightening. Fiske and Maddox have performed Herculean tasks by scouring newspapers, court records, and secondary works to bring to light aspects of slavery and race relations that often pass unnoticed in most accounts of life in the antebellum US. Their books complement works by Carol Wilson (e.g., Freedom at Risk, 1994) and William C. Kashatus (Just Over the Line, 2002).
--L. B. Gimelli, Eastern Michigan University