A Madman's Will
John Randolph, 400 Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom
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A Madman's Will
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Narrated by:
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Johnny Heller
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By:
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Gregory May
About this listen
Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773-1833), which—almost inexplicably—freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicized manumissions in American history. So famous is the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates has used it to condemn Randolph’s cousin, Thomas Jefferson, for failing to free his own slaves. With this groundbreaking investigation, historian Gregory May now reveals a more surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph’s wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves—and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them.
Sweeping from the legal spectacle of the contested will through the freedmen’s dramatic flight and horrific reception in Ohio, A Madman’s Will is an extraordinary saga about the alluring promise of freedom and its tragic limitations.
©2023 Gregory May (P)2023 Dreamscape MediaListeners also enjoyed...
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Story5 out of 5 stars 151
Few historical figures are as intriguing as John Brown, the controversial Abolitionist who used terrorist tactics against slavery and single-handedly changed the course of American history. This brilliant biography of Brown (1800-1859) by the prize-winning critic and cultural biographer David S. Reynolds brings to life the Puritan warrior who gripped slavery by the throat and triggered the Civil War. When does principled resistance become anarchic brutality? How can a murderer be viewed as a heroic freedom fighter? The case of John Brown opens windows on these timely issues.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The story of the man who saved America from itself
- By Marc on 09-29-20
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The Ledger and the Chain
- How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America
- By: Joshua D. Rothman
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 64
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 52
Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men - who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South - were essential to slavery's expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States. In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This is a Historical Study! And a Great Read
- By BookwormHLH on 08-15-22
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Three Roads to the Alamo
- The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis
- By: William C. Davis
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 27 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 46
Three Roads to the Alamo is the definitive work about the lives of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis - the legendary frontiersmen and fighters who met their destiny at the Alamo in one of the most famous and tragic battles in American history - and about what really happened in that battle.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Grandfather Dr. Death eats Applesauce on Christmas
- By McKinley L. Donnor on 07-15-20
By: William C. Davis
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Unworthy Republic
- The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
- By: Claudio Saunt
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 117
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 96
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Story5 out of 5 stars 95
In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington's small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government's auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Slow Burn
- By Hervé DuThé on 04-20-20
By: Claudio Saunt
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Stolen
- The Astonishing Odyssey of Five Boys Along the Reverse Underground Railroad
- By: Richard Bell
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 108
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 91
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 92
Philadelphia, 1825: Five young, free Black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the US. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Should have been a fact based novel
- By Cate F. on 01-11-21
By: Richard Bell
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Union
- The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood
- By: Colin Woodard
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 98
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 81
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 81
Union tells the story of the struggle to create a national myth for the United States, one that could hold its rival regional cultures together and forge an American nationhood.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Required Reading
- By Ben Brafford on 08-30-20
By: Colin Woodard
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Dreams of Africa in Alabama
- The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America
- By: Sylviane A. Diouf
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
In the summer of 1860, more than 50 years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Should be required reading in all schools.
- By Anonymous User on 12-31-21
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An Imperfect God
- George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America
- By: Henry Wiencek
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 43
Washington was born and raised among Blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both Black and White troops, Washington's attitudes began to change.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent handling of one part of Wahington's life
- By buffaloboy on 05-20-04
By: Henry Wiencek
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The War Before the War
- Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War
- By: Andrew Delbanco
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 201
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 177
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Story5 out of 5 stars 177
For decades after its founding, America was really two nations—one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the "united" states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was in fact a prison-house in which millions of Americans had no rights.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Great promise greater disappointment
- By Amazon Customer on 12-09-18
By: Andrew Delbanco
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Oliver Wendell Holmes
- A Life in War, Law, and Ideas
- By: Stephen Budiansky
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 428
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 360
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 357
Holmes twice escaped death as a young Union officer in the Civil War when musket balls barely missed his heart and spinal cord. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Named to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt at age 61, he served for nearly three decades, writing a series of famous, eloquent, and often dissenting opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court's reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Top-Notch Biography
- By Jean on 08-01-19
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Master of the Mountain
- Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
- By: Henry Wiencek
- Narrated by: Brian Holsopple
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 109
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 99
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Story4 out of 5 stars 98
Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Henry Wiencek's eloquent, persuasive book - based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson's papers - opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson's world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Clear, Insightful & Iconclastic History
- By R.S. on 04-18-13
By: Henry Wiencek
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The Zealot and the Emancipator
- John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 195
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 167
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 165
Master storyteller and best-selling historian H. W. Brands narrates the epic struggle over slavery as embodied by John Brown and Abraham Lincoln - two men moved to radically different acts to confront our nation’s gravest sin. The Zealot and the Emancipator is acclaimed historian H. W. Brands' thrilling account of how two American giants shaped the war for freedom.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I Never Knew That!
- By William G. Stuart on 10-19-20
By: H. W. Brands
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Abe
- Abraham Lincoln in His Times
- By: David S. Reynolds
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 33 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 212
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 179
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 176
Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Cultural History is not a biography
- By Marc M. Sager on 11-09-20
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The Agitators
- Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights
- By: Dorothy Wickenden
- Narrated by: Heather Alicia Simms, Anne Twomey, Gabra Zackman, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 96
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 80
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 80
In the 1850s, Harriet Tubman, strategically brilliant and uncannily prescient, rescued some seventy enslaved people from Maryland’s Eastern Shore and shepherded them north along the underground railroad. One of her regular stops was Auburn, New York, where she entrusted passengers to Martha Coffin Wright, a Quaker mother of seven, and Frances A. Seward, the wife of William H. Seward. Through exhaustive research, Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about, the toll it took on their families, and its lasting effects on the country.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent!
- By Nikki on 12-22-21
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The Bone and Sinew of the Land
- By: Anna-Lisa Cox
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 36
Starting in our nation's earliest years, thousands of free African Americans were building hundreds of settlements in the Northwest Territory, a territory that banned slavery and gave equal voting rights to all men. This groundbreaking work of research reveals the lost history of the nation's first Great Migration. Though forgotten today, these pioneers were a matter of national importance at the time; their mere existence leading to fierce political movements and battles that tore families and communities apart long before the Civil War erupted.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A must read for all!
- By Linda on 05-14-19
By: Anna-Lisa Cox
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Bound for Canaan
- The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement
- By: Fergus Bordewich
- Narrated by: Peter J. Fernandez
- Length: 19 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 76
The Civil War brought to a climax the country's bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery's denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and white, slave and free, who joined forces to create what would come to be known as the Underground Railroad, a movement that occupies as romantic a place in the nation's imagination as the Lewis and Clark expedition.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Heroic Missing Piece
- By Paul Frandano on 03-03-17
By: Fergus Bordewich
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Separate
- The Story of Plessy V. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation
- By: Steve Luxenberg
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 19 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 136
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 124
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 125
Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with "separate but equal", created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the 19th century, whose outcome embraced and protected segregation, and whose reverberations are still felt into the 21st. Separate spans a striking range of characters and landscapes, bound together by the defining issue of their time and ours - race and equality.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Black and White in shades of grey
- By JKC on 03-15-19
By: Steve Luxenberg
What listeners say about A Madman's Will
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- BCornell
- 08-15-23
Fascinating legal battle over manumission
I previously listened to and greatly enjoyed Gregory May's book on Gallatin, "Jefferson's Treasure". Here, he brings to light a legal case I'd never heard of, i.e., John Randolph's manumission of his slaves after his death in 1833. Great intrigue and confusion resulted from Randolph's will. Did he actually mean what he indicated or was he out of his mind? Were there other copies of the will that might take precedence? But it's the story of what happened afterwards to this former slaves (known as the Roanokes) that is even more compelling. With land purchased for their use in Ohio, they had a long and tragic battle ahead of them. This is a great and unsettling piece of American history that is well served by May's attention.
The narrator, Johnny Heller, is one of my favorites. He has a distinctive voice that he uses so well to emphasize the author's points. I'd listen to anything he reads.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Ellen K Wessel
- 09-07-23
Perfect narrator for this tortuous story
Kudos to narrator Johnny Heller for guiding me through this deeply researched, complex and disturbing story. As soon as I finished listening to it, I went out and bought a hard copy for the footnotes and illustrations.
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