There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Several thousand freed slaves were sent to Liberia from 1820 to 1840 in honor of Monroe, the capital was renamed Monrovia.Ī quick, informative history of a lamentable chapter in America’s past.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. James Madison, convinced that slaves should not be freed into white America, founded the American Colonization Society, “dedicated to freeing slaves and transporting them to the west coast of Africa.” James Monroe, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson also endorsed that idea. Holland reprises Jefferson’s connection to the Hemings family, whose descendants claimed that he fathered Sally Hemings’ children, and he reveals that even presidents who spoke against slavery kept slaves to run their farms and work on their land. “I am free now and choose to remain so,” she replied. Tracked down, Oney was told that the Washingtons would free her when she returned to them-but she didn’t believe the offer. Martha cherished Oney, and she was devastated when the woman fled from servitude. They were among some 150 slaves that Washington amassed by the time of the Revolution, many bought by his wife. Although some slaves’ lives have been lost to history, Holland creates a vivid portrait of many, including William Lee, who worked as Washington’s “body servant,” and Oney Judge, born at Mount Vernon, who was Martha Washington’s favorite. Of the first 12 presidents, only John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, fierce opponents of slavery, did not own slaves, thereby incurring heavy costs for domestic help to maintain the White House.

Grant, and exposes the convoluted laws enacted to impede slaves’ quests for freedom.

In this brisk history, Holland ( Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African American History In and Around Washington, D.C., 2007), Washington correspondent for the Associated Press, examines the tangled relationships between slaves and the presidents they served, from George Washington to Ulysses S. Ten of the first 12 United States presidents were slave masters.

Who Buries the Dead by C.S. Harris