| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era. By Wilma King. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. xviii, 290 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8262-1657-1. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8262-1660-1.)

This monograph will serve as an authoritative, comprehensive reference text on its subject for future historians. Training her eye on the colonial period through the Civil War, Wilma King narrates an overview of the experience of free black women in the United States. She organizes the book's chapters around several themes: methods of obtaining freedom; views and expectations of black women; wage-earning work; educational attainments; religious activity; activism, especially abolitionism; and responses to the Civil War. Drawing on both secondary and archival material, the narrative is national in scope, but necessarily weighted by the sources toward the experience of northeastern and southern women rather than those from the western states. Thus King highlights the experience of several figures familiar to specialists in the history of African American women. Through King's examination of wills, court documents, black journals and magazines, memoirs and correspondence, church papers, and records of black women's benevolent societies, the reader also learns of more obscure individuals such as the slave owner Betsy Sompayrac, ambivalent wife Victoire Brustie, and advice dispenser Rebecca Peterson.

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