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BRIAN MCGINTY IS an enormously talented storyteller and historian. He has a journalist’s sense of how to ferret out facts and stories and weave them together. His new book, Archy Lee’s Struggle for Freedom, cleverly uses the story of the slave Archy as a window into California’s first decade as a state.
At one level, this is fine legal history. McGinty has sorted out an enormously complicated case involving a Mississippi-born slave, Archy, whose master, Charles Stovall, brought him to Gold Rush California, a free state. Stovall then tried to ship him back to Mississippi. Friends of Archy intervened. There were at least four sets of legal proceedings in different courts, with Archy in and out of jail for safekeeping, hidden by his friends, seized illegally (kidnapped) by Stovall, and also returned to Stovall after a court proceeding. At one point, Stovall was formally charged with kidnapping, and was bailed out, while his victim, Archy, remained in jail because he was possibly a fugitive slave. Confusing? You bet. But McGinty does a fine job of sorting it all out.
full: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-california-story-of-a-slaves-struggle-for-freedom/
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