Joshua D Rothman: A Pioneer in the Cause of Freedom, Gebunden

Blurb

"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 sue for their liberty, and he confronted slave traders who kidnapped free Black Americans with the aim of selling them as slaves in the Deep South. 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 by John Shoemaker Tyson, Elisha's nephew, shortly after his death. In this volume, Rothman-a pre-eminent historian of slavery and abolition-seeks to remedy that silence. Not by writing a new biography of Elisha Tyson, but by contextualizing both the abolitionist's life and the biography written by Tyson's nephew. In addition to an annotated version of that nineteenth-century biography, Rothman also provides a thorough introduction to the man and his religious, political, and ideological worlds along with a set of ancillary documents that illuminate some of Tyson's work"--