Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

Bondage in Egypt is the first book in over a century dedicated to the study of slavery in Illinois. For most Americans, Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, is thought of as a “free state” in America’s great struggle with slavery. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned both slavery and involuntary servitude in the territory and state. Here, Darrel Dexter documents how slavery legally existed in Illinois from 1720 to 1865. After more than a decade of research in local, territorial, state and federal records, Dexter clearly explains the irony of Illinois, geographically and ideologically wedged between slave and free states. After the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln, the slavery that had existed in the thirty-four counties of southern Illinois known regionally as “Egypt,” was either forgotten or ignored. This study explains how African Americans were subjected to slavery, servitude, indenture-and worse, in “free” Illinois. Perhaps his greatest contribution is an explanation of the legal issues that denied freedom to so many individuals who lived or attempted to live in “Egypt” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is an important book. In one dimension it is a regional study. But, it is a regional study of national significance. Darrel Dexter has produced a carefully researched history of how the South’s “peculiar institution” had a home in Illinois for a century and half.