A Pioneer in the Cause of Freedom: The Life of Elisha Tyson [Hardcover]

JOSHUA D. ROTHMAN is professor of history and chair of the history department at the University of Alabama, where he specializes in the history of slavery, race, nineteenth-century America, and the American South. He is the author or editor of four previous books, including Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861; Reforming America, 18150-1860: A Norton Documents Reader; Flush Times & Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Georgia), and, most recently, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America, which was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Book Prize from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery and the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize from the Journal of Global Slavery. He is also the codirector of Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from American Slavery.

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 to sue for their liberty, and he confronted slave traders who kidnapped free Black Americans with the aim of selling them into slavery. By the tlÃ0