Joshua D. Rothman – författare

In 1834 Virgil Stewart rode from western Tennessee to a territory known as the “Arkansas morass” in pursuit of John Murrell, a thief accused of stealing two slaves. Stewart’s adventure led to a sensational trial and a wildly popular published account that would ultimately help trigger widespread violence during the summer of 1835, when five men accused of being professional gamblers were hanged in Vicksburg, nearly a score of others implicated with a gang of supposed slave thieves were executed in plantation districts, and even those who tried to stop the bloodshed found themselves targeted as dangerous and subversive. Using Stewart’s story as his point of entry, Joshua D. Rothman details why these events, which engulfed much of central and western Mississippi, came to pass. He also explains how the events revealed the fears, insecurities, and anxieties underpinning the cotton boom that made Mississippi the most seductive and exciting frontier in the Age of Jackson.As investors, settlers, slaves, brigands, and fortune-hunters converged in what was then America’s Southwest, they created a tumultuous landscape that promised boundless opportunity and spectacular wealth. Predicated on ruthless competition, unsustainable debt, brutal exploitation, and speculative financial practices that looked a lot like gambling, this landscape also produced such profound disillusionment and conflict that it contained the seeds of its own potential destruction. Rothman sheds light on the intertwining of slavery and capitalism in the period leading up to the Panic of 1837, highlighting the deeply American impulses underpinning the evolution of the slave South and the dizzying yet unstable frenzy wrought by economic flush times. It is a story with lessons for our own day.Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

Descended from German Quakers who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century, Elisha Tyson was born in 1749. As a young man he became wealthy in the milling business in northeastern Maryland before moving in the early 1780s to Baltimore, where he grew even wealthier and established a reputation as a prominent member of the city’s business community. Over the course of more than three decades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tyson helped found abolition societies, supported schools for free Black children, and contributed to the creation of numerous Black institutions and benevolent societies. He filed freedom petitions on behalf of enslaved people and pushed for the passage of liberalized manumission laws in Maryland. He used some of his fortune to assist Black people who claimed they were illegally held in bondage to sue for their liberty, and he confronted slave traders who kidnapped free Black Americans with the aim of selling them into slavery. By the time he died in February 1824, Elisha Tyson had personally aided in the liberation of perhaps two thousand Black people.Yet the only biography published about this remarkable man was penned shortly after his death by John Shoemaker Tyson, Elisha Tyson’s nephew. In A Pioneer in the Cause of Freedom, Joshua D. Rothman—a preeminent historian of slavery and abolition—seeks to remedy that silence. Along with an annotated version of that nineteenth-century biography, Rothman provides a thorough introduction to Elisha Tyson’s religious, political, and ideological worlds as well as a set of selected documents that illuminate some of Tyson’s work.

Descended from German Quakers who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century, Elisha Tyson was born in 1749. As a young man he became wealthy in the milling business in northeastern Maryland before moving in the early 1780s to Baltimore, where he grew even wealthier and established a reputation as a prominent member of the city’s business community. Over the course of more than three decades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tyson helped found abolition societies, supported schools for free Black children, and contributed to the creation of numerous Black institutions and benevolent societies. He filed freedom petitions on behalf of enslaved people and pushed for the passage of liberalized manumission laws in Maryland. He used some of his fortune to assist Black people who claimed they were illegally held in bondage to sue for their liberty, and he confronted slave traders who kidnapped free Black Americans with the aim of selling them into slavery. By the time he died in February 1824, Elisha Tyson had personally aided in the liberation of perhaps two thousand Black people.Yet the only biography published about this remarkable man was penned shortly after his death by John Shoemaker Tyson, Elisha Tyson’s nephew. In A Pioneer in the Cause of Freedom, Joshua D. Rothman—a preeminent historian of slavery and abolition—seeks to remedy that silence. Along with an annotated version of that nineteenth-century biography, Rothman provides a thorough introduction to Elisha Tyson’s religious, political, and ideological worlds as well as a set of selected documents that illuminate some of Tyson’s work.