All Different Kinds of Free by Jessica McCann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A free woman of color in the 1830s, Margaret Morgan lived a life full of promise. One frigid night in Pennsylvania, that changed forever. They tore her family apart. They put her in chains. They never expected her to fight back.In 1837, Margaret Morgan was kidnapped from her home in Pennsylvania and sold into slavery. The state of Pennsylvania charged her kidnapper with the crime, but the conviction was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was the first time a major branch of the federal government had made a pro-slavery stand, and the ruling in Prigg v. Pennsylvania sewed the bitter seeds of the states’ rights battle that eventually would lead to the Civil War.Yet, the heart of this story is not a historic Supreme Court ruling. It is the remarkable, unforgettable Margaret Morgan. Her life would never be the same. Her family had been torn apart. Uncaring forces abused her body and her heart. But she refused to give up, refused to stop fighting, refused to allow her soul to be enslaved.
All different kinds of free, and all different kinds of bondage too. Heartwarming, and heartbreaking. In my revery I laughed out loud, and at times I cried aloud too. This wonderfully felicitous novel is one of the best written books I’ve read in a while, and one of the most sobering too. I highly recommend this book to history lovers, and all lovers of humanity too.
I often marveled at how there can be all different kinds of free… I suppose now I’ve learned there are all different kinds of bondage, too.
A historical fiction novel, All Different Kinds of Free, has an amazing blend of prose and subtlety of ventricular, with a writing style easy for me to read. That, and a story needing to be told makes this a book I’ll be talking to others about, without a doubt. I look forward to this author’s next novel.