Freedom's Mirage : Virgil Bennehan's Odyssey from Emancipation to Exile

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

SYDNEY NATHANS

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African American physicians--History--19th century--Biography.

African American physicians.

Free African Americans--History--19th century--Biography.

Free African Americans.

United States--Race relations--19th century.

United States.

Bennehan, Virgil, 1808-1850.

Bennehan, Virgil.

Genre:

Biographies.

Place of Publication:

University of North Carolina Press 2024

Summary:

Freedom's Mirage traces the exceptional life of Virgil Bennehan, born in bondage in 1808 in Piedmont North Carolina, who rose to become an enslaved doctor on one of the South's largest plantations and to view himself as a friend to Black and white people alike. Emancipated in 1848 but required to leave the state to be free, he was sent to Liberia. Though richly endowed and royally welcomed, he found himself subject to new rulers and mired in the worst medical catastrophe in Liberian history. Recrossing the Atlantic, he boldly returned to North Carolina to warn slave owners that Liberia was a death trap. Yet again exiled from his native state, he declared in March 1849 his intention to go to gold rush California, the one place at midcentury that seemed to offer an open field, even to a man of color. Intrepidly researched and grippingly told, Virgil Bennehan's story reveals the complexity and fragility of human relationships within bondage. Once liberated, Bennehan led a tumultuous life that dramatized the fleeting promise and pervasive limits of Black freedom in the era of slavery-and foreshadowed the future for generations that followed.

Contents:

The exception

Toxic terrain, medical calling

The best judges

Freedom bound

Patrons galore

I am not certain

The height of folly

The messenger

A broken bond

The certainty of uncertainty

Outcasts.

ISBN:

9781469679075

1469679078

9781469682662

1469682664

9781469682686

1469682680