A madman's will John Randolph, 400 slaves, and the mirage of freedom

May, a historian and attorney, reveals that John Randolph, an early-nineteenth-century Virginia slaveholder and senator who actively promoted state's rights and pro-slavery policies, wrote a will that freed 400 enslaved people at Roanoke, his plantation. May's biography of Randolph includes sketches of friends and family, accounts of the lives of enslaved and free African Americans in the South and North, antebellum views of madness, and accounts of legal battles. The court cases arose from Randolph's family's eagerness to profit from his estate, disagreements over whether Randolph was mentally competent to write a will, and confusion over the existence of multiple wills. May also chronicles the continued travails experienced by the enslaved people on Randolph's plantation even after the courts affirmed that Randolph intended to free them as well as life on the American frontier, where the freed men and women hoped to settle. Two appendices and a time line will help readers follow May's detailed illumination of significant events not found in most American histories. This is an invaluable narrative that sheds light on -present-day struggles for racial justice and debates about reparations.

Lawyer-turned-historian May (Jefferson's Treasure) offers a fascinating account of Virginia senator John Randolph's posthumous efforts to free nearly 400 enslaved people and provide for their resettlement. A "relentless defender of states' rights," Randolph (1773--1833) was one of Virginia's largest slaveholders, and his "deathbed declaration" that his slaves must be freed took many by surprise. After Randolph's death, however, executors discovered two wills--an 1821 version that freed his slaves and an 1832 version that left his estate to his niece's infant son and made no mention of manumission. Much legal wrangling ensued, with some of Randolph's heirs seeking to have the 1821 will set aside by proving that Randolph was "mad" when he wrote it. (Randolph's executor, Judge William Leigh, wanted the 1832 will set aside for similar reasons.) Though the 1821 will was eventually upheld, the story has an unhappy ending--before the freedmen could settle on land purchased on their behalf in Mercer County, Ohio, they were expelled from the county by a white mob and their community was dispersed. May lucidly untangles the legal proceedings and draws vivid character sketches of Randolph and others, while building an irrefutable case that freedom is only the first step to equality. This is history at its finest. Illus. (Apr.)

The curious case of a much-contested antebellum will that freed hundreds of enslaved people in Virginia. A second cousin of Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph (1773-1833) was a fiery believer in states' rights and a limited federal government. Randolph amassed a fortune--and, like Jefferson, a mountain of debt--farming on the Virginia piedmont. After he died, it was discovered that Randolph had left several versions of a will and its codicils, some of which manumitted the nearly 400 enslaved people he owned. May, a former lawyer and author of Jefferson's Treasure, creates a kind of Bleak House narrative early on, puzzling out the terms of that apparently magnanimous act, which "became a national sensation"--and which was litigated for a dozen years as Randolph's relatives stepped forward to claim a share of his property. Finally declared to be free by virtue of a sympathetic judge, the enslaved people faced an unsympathetic body of law, one of whose statutes declared that free Black people must leave Virginia or be subject to reenslavement. The judge traveled to Ohio, where the law "prohibited any person of African descent from settling in the state unless two Ohio landowners posted a $500 bond for the person's support." He found a place for the freed Virginians to settle, though Ohio vigilantes immediately drove them out and forced them to settle elsewhere. Although the narrative threatens to come to a grinding halt at times in legal minutiae, May does a good job of pointing out the contradictions of the law in both free and slave states. He also paints a vivid portrait of Randolph himself, a man who, while privately opposed to slavery, was not shy about building his fortune on the backs of enslaved people and whose liberation was less than pure. "Because manumission was just an exercise of the giver's rights," May writes, "it changed almost nothing." A twisty story that illuminates the elaborate legal system built to defend slavery and silence its discontents. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.