Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery
Adam Rothman
Born into slavery in rural Louisiana, Rose Herera was bought and sold several times before being purchased by the De Hart family of New Orleans. Still a slave, she married and had children, who also became the property of the De Harts. But after Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862 during the American Civil War, Herera’s owners fled to Havana, taking three of her small children with them. Beyond Freedom’s Reach is the true story of one woman’s quest to rescue her children from bondage.
In a gripping, meticulously researched account, Adam Rothman lays bare the mayhem of emancipation during and after the Civil War. Just how far the rights of freed slaves extended was unclear to black and white people alike, and so when Mary De Hart returned to New Orleans in 1865 to visit friends, she was surprised to find herself taken into custody as a kidnapper. The case of Rose Herera’s abducted children made its way through New Orleans’ courts, igniting a custody battle that revealed the prospects and limits of justice during Reconstruction.
Rose Herera’s perseverance brought her children’s plight to the attention of members of the U.S. Senate and State Department, who turned a domestic conflict into an international scandal. Beyond Freedom’s Reach is an unforgettable human drama and a poignant reflection on the tangled politics of slavery and the hazards faced by so many Americans on the hard road to freedom.
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About Adam Rothman
Reviews for Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery
Jason Berry
Daily Beast
The book’s major novelty is its focus on individual personal suffering as opposed to a typical slavery history which is concerned with the quantity of suffering… The informal and engaging tone succeeds in lending Beyond Freedom’s Reach an accessibility to introduce non-specialists to the field of study, whilst aptly adding a human touch to an emotional subject.
Michael Warren
LSE Review of Books
Meticulously researched, well-written and thoughtfully argued, this work should attract not only students of African-American history; those who study southern and Civil War history will enhance their knowledge of 1850–1860s Deep South culture.
Carol Wilson
Civil War Book Review
The extraordinary odyssey of Rose Herera to recover her kidnapped children from slavery illuminates the impact of the Civil War on the enslavers and the enslaved and reminds us of the precariousness of freedom during the Reconstruction era. An impressive and compelling history.
Randy J. Sparks, author of Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade Amidst slavery’s unraveling in New Orleans, Rose Herera fought to prevent her owner from taking her children to Havana, ‘beyond freedom’s reach.’ Rothman’s recovery of Herera’s remarkable story, her incarceration and journey through the legal system to rescue her children, marks an important contribution to the history of emancipation and the contingency of wartime freedom.
Thavolia Glymph, author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household Adam Rothman weaves together an incisive narrative of slavery, freedom, and family in wartime Louisiana.
Karen Cook Bell
Journal of Southern History
Adam Rothman has contributed a gem to our understanding of the end of slavery.
Minoa Uffleman
Arkansas Review
A riveting chronicle.
Wilma King
American Historical Review
This is microhistory at its best.
Lawrence N. Powell
Journal of American History
In this gem of social history, Rothman recovers the lives of Rose Herera and her family.
Alfred L. Brophy
The Historian
Ideally suited to the undergraduate classroom.
Richard Bell
Journal of the Civil War Era
Besides being a truly engaging story, Rothman’s work is a model of how the historian sleuth can imaginatively explore large issues by following clues and tracing leads at the personal and local level, cues often unseen at first glance.
Joyce Broussard
Civil War History
I have said before that we are in a renaissance of excellent historical writing for a general public that wants to read something more than hagiographic narratives. Add Adam Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach to the list. Rothman tells the story of Rose Herera, a New Orleans slave whose children were spirited away to Cuba by her master during the Civil War. Centering kidnapping in the slave experience, Rothman takes what could be a fairly slender story based upon a relative paucity of evidence to build a tale of great bravery and persistence within a rapidly changing world where African-Americans had relatively little power even in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Erik Loomis
Lawyers, Guns, and Money
Rothman’s narrative is punctuated by expert analysis, and as such is a useful work for students, scholars, and a general public alike. It is particularly valuable as a book that seeks to shed light on kidnapping, a difficult phenomenon for historians to study given that its scope (in any era) is never accurately reflected in the records. For this reason alone, one could call Rothman’s study masterful, because he demonstrates how historians can bring a variety of research techniques to bear on an elusive topic. It stands as a model for how we might reconstruct the subaltern history of kidnapping and connect it with the world of military might and political intrigue within the legal thicket inhabited by both kidnappers and their victims.
H. Robert Baker
American Nineteenth Century History