Minnesota Historical Society Press
It Took Courage: Eliza Winston's Quest for Freedom
Key Metrics
- Christopher P Lehman
- Minnesota Historical Society Press
- Paperback
- 9781681342825
- -
- -
- History > United States - Civil War Period (1850-1877)
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
On August 22, 1860, an enslaved woman from Mississippi named Eliza Winston petitioned for her freedom before a judge in Minnesota--and she won. After she left the state for Canada, the abolitionists who had helped her told and retold the story, emphasizing their own actions; their detractors claimed they had used Winston as a pawn. For more than 150 years, historians' accounts have emphasized the mobs who battled in the streets after the ruling, focusing on the implications of the events for Minnesota politics rather than Winston's own story. With It Took Courage, Christopher P. Lehman helps set the record straight.
Lehman uncovers the story of Winston's first forty-two years and her long struggle to obtain her freedom. She was sold away from her birth family; her husband, a free man, died before he could purchase her freedom. She was enslaved in Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Minnesota. At one time, a sitting US president--Andrew Jackson--bought her, and that purchase kept her enslaved by his relatives for over a quarter of a century.
The survival of the remarkable story of Eliza Winston's battle for individual freedom is an important contribution to the larger understanding of what slavery meant on this continent and how it affected individual lives--in both North and South. Winston's experience demonstrates the lengths to which a person would go to escape slavery, attempting to work both outside and inside the flawed and inequitable laws of the time, until finally receiving justice. If the traditional accounts relied on stereotypical depictions of Winston as simple-minded, in Lehman's skillful description, Winston appears as a capable, mature woman who understood her life and her values. Eliza Winston herself made the bold decision to leave behind everything she had known for an uncertain but free future.
Author Bio
Christopher P. Lehman is a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University and the author of Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1787–1865: A History of Human Bondage in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Chair Professor Lehman teaches at Department of Ethnic, Gender, and Women's Studies of St Cloud State University. Professor Lehman received his PhD from University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Source: Minnesota Historical Society
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