Publishers Weekly
10/07/2019
University of Maryland professor Bell (We Shall Be No More) uncovers the history of the Reverse Underground Railroad in this moving account of five African-American boys kidnapped from Philadelphia and sold into slavery in 1825. According to Bell, “child snatching was frequent, pernicious, and politically significant” in the decades after Congress banned slave imports from Africa and the Caribbean in 1808. After being kidnapped, the boys were forced to make a 1,000-mile trek to the slave markets of Natchez, Miss. Along the way, 10-year-old Cornelius Sinclair was sold to an Alabama cotton planter, and the kidnappers beat another boy to death. In Rocky Springs, Miss., 15-year-old Sam Scomp convinced a plantation owner that he and the others had been abducted, setting into motion a series of legal battles that, Bell argues, culminated in the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which “put the country on a collision course with civil war.” Drawing from a wealth of archival materials, Bell paints a harrowing picture of this human trafficking network and the “tens of thousands of free black people” it ensnared. The result is a scholarly work that tells a powerful human interest story. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
’BOY LOST,’ read the advertisement placed in a newspaper by the father of one of the five free boys kidnapped in Philadelphia in 1825. Richard Bell’s heartbreaking and searing account of their story chronicles not only the agonies and atrocities of slavery, but the fragility of freedom, and the dauntlessness of resistance.” - Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
“Opening an unknown world from an unsung tragedy that started in early national Philadelphia and stretched grimly South, Stolen offers a worm’s eye view of the leviathan of American slavery, and of some of its most dastardly perpetrators and its most remarkable survivors. Richard Bell has researched inventively and mastered a vast body of scholarship, as we would expect from so distinguished a historian. But he also imbues his tale with the deep humanity of a great novelist. Both riveting and heartrending, Stolen joins the great literature of America’s founding tragedy, earning a place alongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrison.” – Jane Kamensky, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University
“Stolen is historical storytelling at its best. Bell makes brilliant detective work come alive with vivid, powerful writing. The saga of these five boys, kidnapped and smuggled from Philadelphia to Mississippi in the 1820s, captures both the powerful undertow of slavery in the free black communities of the North and the urgent dawning of the abolitionist movement. There's been nothing like it since Northup.” —Adam Rothman, author of Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery
“Rigorously researched, heartfelt, and dramatically concise, Bell's investigation illuminates the role slavery played in the systemic inequalities that still confront Black Americans.” —Booklist
“A well-told story... A deep dive into the extraordinary risks faced by free blacks in the antebellum era.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A fascinating story.”—Library Journal
"It’s an uncomfortable part of New Orleans’ history, but one that needs to be told. Bell’s story — part thriller, part tragedy, part ode to the resilience of the human spirit — goes a long way to making that history come alive." - The Advocate
In Stolen Richard Bell brings to life amoral con men, heartless slave dealers and suffering
victims. He vividly re-creates the squalid social environments of interstate human trafficking.
His superbly researched and engaging book exposes previously hidden horrors of American
slavery. - The Wall Street Journal
"Meticulously researched...Stolen is a remarkable narrative, in part, because of how Bell manages to clearly relate the complex politics of the time without ever legitimizing the choices made by those who bought and sold human lives." -NPR
Kirkus Reviews
2019-07-15
A historian tells the harrowing story of five free black boys kidnapped in Philadelphia by a brutal gang who hoped to sell them into slavery.
After the United States outlawed the importing of slaves in 1808, black residents of free states like Pennsylvania lived in dread of kidnappers who hoped to sell them in the labor-deprived South. Bell (Early American History/Univ. of Maryland; We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, 2012) brings their terrors to life as he reconstructs this little-known episode in American history. The author focuses on five boys lured onto a ship on the Philadelphia waterfront in 1825 by a criminal gang led by Joseph Johnson, whose accomplices included his brother and sister-in-law, Ebenezer and Sally Johnson. Newlyweds Ebenezer and Sally took the boys on a horrific journey by foot and wagon toward the slave market in Natchez, Mississippi, that soon went awry. Ebenezer sold one boy in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, when cash ran low and beat another so savagely he died on the trip. The three remaining boys, desperate but alert, caught a break when one ran away and told his story to a sympathetic Mississippi cotton planter. That encounter set in motion near-miraculous events involving heroic acts by the planter and his lawyer and Joseph Watson, the mayor of Philadelphia, all determined to return the boys to the city and to freedom. Tapping rich archival sources, Bell overreaches only when he strains to portray criminals like the Johnson gang as a "Reverse Underground Railroad," drawing oversimplified parallels between people like Harriet Tubman, a "conductor" on that storied network, and murderous thugs like Ebenezer, whom he casts as "a conductor" on its evil twin. His book—more comprehensive than Solomon Northup's memoir of his own kidnapping, Twelve Years a Slave—needed no such distracting comparisons to deserve wide attention. Ultimately, Bell offers a well-told story of brave, abducted boys—and the equally brave adults who fought for them—slightly undercut by its aggressive casting of Underground Railroad workers and kidnappers of free blacks as mirror images of one another.
A deep dive into the extraordinary risks faced by free blacks in the antebellum era.
