"Winch's magnificent biography...sets the record straight, restoring Forten to the position he achieved for himself in life: a "gentleman of color" and an American patriot in the front rank of the fight for freedom."
Philadelphia Inquirer "Rediscovering the life of the once-prominent Forten, largely unknown today, Winch has achieved something quite profound and affecting.... Indefatigable research and lucid prose combine to ... Read moreproduce a book whose importance cannot be overstated."
Kirkus Review, starred "Winch has done a masterful job of researching and piecing together Forten's life...This new critical biography not only restores him to his rightful place in American history, but also presents readers with an invigorating and challenging new portrait of pre- and post-Revolutionary race relations and identities...[Winch's] scholarship is both outstanding and vital."
Publisher's Weekly "Winch inventively used historical context to find her subject's place in 19th-century Philadelphia and goes deep inside Forten's social and intellectual world to explain his quest for respect as a citizen and a man.... This first biography of Forten does much to reveal a complexity and range of experience among 19-century blacks."
Library Journal "This book put me in the presence of Mr. James Forten, an African American, who in the time of slavery was, indeed, a gentleman. The freedom he enjoyed was the freedom he himself created. It was a great pleasure to have spent some time in his company."
Ossie Davis "At long last we have a deeply researched, well-written biography of James Forten, a black veteran of the American Revolution who, in Horatio Alger style, became a wealthy sailmaker, an employer in Philadelphia of many whites as well as blacks, and one of the first black abolitionists. As a result of Julie Winch's exhaustive research, she must know almost as much about sailmaking and black Philadelphia as James Forten did."
David Brion Davis, Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University "Julie Winch has written the best biography of an antebellum African American I have read in many years. Exhaustively researched and stunningly argued, her biography of Philadelphia's James Forten belongs on the shelf of every American historian. Our understanding of race relations in one of the centers of African American life is immeasurably advanced by this rich study."
Gary B. Nash, University of California, Los Angeles, and author of First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Public Memory "The definitive biography of James Forten, his family, and his community. Julie Winch's impressive mastery of the historical sources allows her to paint an intimate and textured portrait, richly illuminating the political, social, and economic life of America's first generations. This impressive story of a distinguished African American will inform the scholarly debate on race and society in early America for years to come."
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, co-authors of In Hope of Liberty and Hard Road to Freedom Show Less