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

W. Caleb McDaniel tells the story of Henrietta Wood, a woman born into slavery in Kentucky around 1819 who was freed, kidnapped back into bondage and eventually won the largest known court judgment for slavery restitution in American history. McDaniel follows Wood's first path to freedom, when the wife of her French owner brought her to free soil in Cincinnati and registered her as free in 1848, and then her betrayal five years later, when relatives of her former owner paid a Kentucky deputy sheriff, Zebulon Ward, to kidnap her across the Ohio River and sell her back into slavery in the Deep South.

McDaniel traces the years Wood spent enslaved in Mississippi and Texas, where she bore her son Arthur, and her return to Cincinnati in 1869 to sue Ward in federal court. The case, Wood versus Ward, took years to reach trial; her lawyer asked for twenty thousand dollars, and in 1878 a jury awarded her twenty five hundred dollars, a sum that remains, adjusted for inflation to roughly sixty five thousand of today's dollars, the largest amount any United States court is known to have awarded for slavery reparations.

McDaniel builds the book from court records, newspaper accounts and genealogical research that let him follow Wood and her son across four decades and several states, and reading it means encountering the modern debate over reparations grounded in one woman's documented, hard fought case rather than in abstraction. It suits a reader who wants slavery's afterlife in American law made concrete through a single life.