Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America.

Caleb W. McDaniel. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019).

           Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction have been common themes in scholarly sources throughout history, with historians writing of the struggles that slaves, freeborn blacks, and manumitted peoples faced in both the North and South. Scholars have not, however, told the story of slavery in terms of restitution. In Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, Rice University Professor of History W. Caleb McDaniel tells the true story of Henrietta Wood, “a black woman who survived enslavement twice—and then made a powerful white man pay.”^[i] In his page-turning narrative, McDaniel recounts the agonizing, yet triumphant story of Henrietta Wood’s long fight for justice and the reparations that came with it.

           In his main narrative, which he divides into three parts, McDaniel tells of the life and struggles of Henrietta Wood, a black woman who was born into slavery and sold many times. Although Wood’s owner legally freed her in 1848, a deputy sheriff and slaveowner from Kentucky named Zebulon Ward made a deal with Wood’s employer, abducted her, and sold her back into slavery five years later.^[ii] Wood remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, telling her story to anyone who would listen and never forgetting the man who had put her in that position. After Wood returned to Kentucky, she sued Ward for illegally kidnapping and enslaving her. Although she was unsuccessful in this freedom suit, the loss opened the door for another suit years later.^[iii] In 1869, after Wood obtained her freedom for a second time, she returned to Cincinnati and sued Ward for the damages he did to her and her son. After eight years, Wood finally won her case in front of a federal jury, which awarded her $2,500.^[iv] Although this was not the amount that Wood originally asked for, the fact that she received any money at all was the most important victory, as Wood received the “largest known sum ever awarded by a U.S. court in restitution for slavery.”^[v]

           McDaniel uses the Prologue and Epilogue to connect Wood’s story to current discussions of reparations. McDaniel explains that he decided to write Sweet Taste of Liberty after having conversations about contemporary debates on restitution. McDaniel writes that, although he already knew about the case between Wood and Ward, he wanted to learn more about the narrative surrounding the matter.^[vi] McDaniel uses the account of Ward, saying that he was “the last American ever to pay for a slave,” to argue that lawsuits seeking restitution are sometimes inadequate to rectifying the past because, even though Ward paid Wood, he never acknowledged that he did something wrong, but instead continually joked about buying slaves.^[vii] McDaniel does not explicitly discuss reparations in his main chapters, but uses the Prologue and Epilogue to tie Wood’s story into the greater narrative of slavery, reparations, and justice. He also uses Wood’s story to show that restitution is not a wholly modern question, as a former slave received restitution money in the late-1800s.

           Although Wood’s journey provides the framework for Sweet Taste of Liberty, McDaniel tells readers about the experiences of those with whom she interacted, including slaveowners, employers, and those involved in the legal process. McDaniel writes a great deal about Wood’s enslavers, often going more in-depth about them than Wood herself. McDaniel attributes this lack of detail about Wood to a lack of source material, explaining that “nineteenth-century records about black women in particular faced an uphill battle for survival in the archives,” as slaveholders worked to silence and hide enslaved peoples.^[viii] It was easier for McDaniel to tell the stories of slaveowners, as there are more primary sources, including newspapers, case files, and handwritten notes, about the lives of these literate, white men in the archives than there are about enslaved peoples.^[ix] This is evident in McDaniel’s extensive Notes section.

           McDaniel is transparent about his sources, devoting the entire Appendix to outlining the sources he used, their weaknesses and strengths, and their importance to his research. The Appendix explains the sources McDaniel used and the struggles he faced in his research. Due to limitations in primary source materials, McDaniel attributes much of the information he used about Wood to two separate interviews she gave to reporters in 1876 and 1879. In these interviews, Wood talked about her experiences in slavery and her attempts to seek freedom and justice.^[x] Although there are some disparities between the interviews and “neither one makes it possible to recover her thoughts or experiences in their entirety,” McDaniel relied on these sources to weave together Wood’s remarkable story as completely as possible.^[xi] It is important that McDaniel writes of these sources at length, as they are the closest connections to Henrietta Wood that historians have. McDaniel makes note of the possible biases from these narratives, writing that “working with such sources requires attention to how the writers’ own ideas may have shaped the interview and its publication.”^[xii] This is an important realization, as the interviewers were most likely white men. This acknowledgement of biases or weaknesses in sources shows that McDaniel is aware of possible discrepancies and open to the notion that there might be different ways to tell Wood’s story.

           Sweet Taste of Liberty is a powerful book that tells the story of a black woman who not only faced enslavement twice, but also achieved a great victory over one of her oppressors and the institution of slavery. McDaniel tells this story in an accessible way, making his book suitable for scholars and general audiences. He has also made many of his sources and archival notes available online, which will allow scholars to do further research on slavery and restitution. McDaniel’s account of ‘a black woman who survived enslavement twice—and then made a powerful white man pay’ is not only a valuable contribution to Civil War and Reconstruction Era history, but has clear connections and relevance to current debates about the place of reparations in society.^[xiii]

Laura Brooke Mundy

Western Carolina University

^[i] W. Caleb McDaniel, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7.

^[ii] McDaniel, Sweet Taste of Liberty, 54.

^[iii] Ibid., 86.                            

^[iv] Ibid., 189, 218.

^[v] Ibid., 4.

^[vi] Ibid., 232.

^[vii] Ibid., 1, 232.

^[viii] Ibid., 245.

^[ix] Ibid., 245.

^[x] Ibid., 251.

^[xi] Ibid., 251.

^[xii] Ibid., 253.

^[xiii] Ibid., 7.