Freedom’s Seekers: Essays on Comparative Emancipation

Ritchie opens with a question, which is also the title of the introduction: "Was U.S. Emancipation Exceptional?" Fie addresses this questions in six chapters entitled "Self-Emancipation across North America," "Slave Soldiers," "Slave Revolt across Borders," "Samuel Ward and the Making of an Imperial Subject," "Freedwomen and Freed Children," and "Freedom's First Generation." The author finds that women and children who gained their freedom were larger proportions of the population than were men in various countries of the Caribbean, Indian Ocean nations, and the United States. Juliet E. K. Walkers Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (1983), and Sundiata Cha-Jua's Americas First Black Town: Brooklyn, Illinois (2000) are vital to a discussion of slavery, self-emancipation, and post-emancipation life in Illinois.