 Hello, I'm Chancellor Ronnie Green. Thank you for joining me for today's Nebraska lecture. This distinguished lecture series features some of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's most notable scholars, researchers, artists, and thinkers. At Nebraska, we believe in the power of every person. For about two decades, the Nebraska lectures have showcased some of Nebraska's finest scholars, people who embody the spirit of this institution and are committed to sharing their knowledge with the public. Our speakers are renowned experts in their fields. They are scholars who strive to collaborate, breaking down the barriers between disciplines. They are educators who are committed to mentoring and shaping the next generation. They are problem solvers who have spent their careers addressing some of society's most pressing challenges. I am so proud of their accomplishments and dedication to our University and the state of Nebraska. Thank you to the Office of Research and Economic Development, the University's Research Council, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and other partners for making this lecture series possible. I hope you enjoy today's Nebraska lecture. For more than 70 years, the enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, filed hundreds of lawsuits for their freedom. They were fighting against a powerful circle of slaveholders beginning with the Jesuits priests who owned some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown on the Potomac River. In this Nebraska lecture, historian Will Thomas tells an intensely human and intricate story about the moral problems of slavery. Will is a professor of history in the John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He served as chair of the Department of History from 2010 to 2016 and was selected as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, a huge honor, in 2016. Will has published widely recognized essays in Civil War history, the Journal of Historical Geography, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Education Review, and Inside Higher Education. His previous books include The Iron Way, Railroads, The Civil War, and The Making of Modern America, which was published by Yale University Press in 2011 and was a shortlist finalist in 2012 for the Lincoln Prize. Will is a graduate of Trinity College and received his master's degree and doctorate in history from the University of Virginia. He currently serves on the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives and Records Administration and on the Board of Fellows at Trinity College. He is a faculty fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities here at the University. Thank you for joining us for Will Thomas' Nebraska lecture today, A Question of Freedom, The Families Who Challenged American Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War. We encourage your participation in this lecture. Please submit your questions online for the Q&A session that will follow the lecture. Greetings from the University of Nebraska. I'm Will Thomas. I'm thrilled to be giving the 2020 Nebraska lecture. It is truly an honor. I would rather be with you today, but COVID-19 makes that impossible. And so we have created a different way of presenting the story behind my new research. Research that includes a major digital project, my book, A Question of Freedom, coming out in November, and a film titled The Bell Affair. Currently in production, it's a feature film. I would like to thank the Office of Research for inviting me to give this distinguished lecture. And I would like to thank the Mill Coffee House for helping us out today. Thank you, Chancellor Ronnie Green, for your support. And thank you for listening and watching. It was June 20th, 1810. Priscilla Queen and Mina Queen arrived at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Both women had sued slaveholders for their freedom. Priscilla Queen sued the Reverend Francis Neal. He was president of Georgetown College, now University. And Mina Queen had sued John Hepburn. He had squandered his immense inheritance in Europe, gone bankrupt, and would fight tooth and nail to reclaim his wealth and his social standing. The trial would decide if the Queens would remain enslaved or if they would be declared free. Whatever the outcome, it would affect their children, their children's children, and generations to come. The building they entered was hardly a symbol of national permanence. The Capitol had been under almost constant repair. Its original timbers were rotting, its plaster was cracking, its wooden staircases were giving way. In the Senate wing, both the Supreme Court and the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia met in the basement. The din of brickwork and plastering rumbled through the stairwells and the lobby and the entrance halls. The exterior entrance to the Capitol was equally chaotic. There was a ramshackle set of wooden planks that joined both wings of the Capitol. Surveying this scene, Priscilla Queen and Mina Queen might have been confident that the scales of justice would tip in their favor. They had good reason to be optimistic. In the 1790s, 15 years earlier, their aunts and their uncles had won a series of freedom suits in the Maryland courts using much of the same evidence that they would present. One of them, Simon Queen, was now a free man. And he would take the stand and testify for them as a witness at their trial. The family's former attorney, Gabriel Duvall, had risen to become an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. And Duvall had agreed to testify as a witness as well for them. Duvall was one of the most prominent political figures in the city of Washington. And their lawyer was Francis Scott Key, an ambitious, well-connected attorney who had already made a name for himself in a major treason case and with many appearances already before the U.S. Supreme Court. But that was not all. They had a deposition that included the direct words of their ancestor, Mary Queen. She said, I was born free and lived in Guayaquil in New Spain. That's Ecuador today. And I was taken from there to London. Those words should have cinched their argument. But almost nothing about their case went as they expected. At the trial for their freedom, Mary Queen's words, the only words ever recorded from her, would not be heard in the U.S. court of law. And as we will see in a moment, researching the Queen's freedom suits would lead me to reckon with what I did not know about my own family and its role in this story. Nearly a decade ago I went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. to find out what I could about the Queen cases. I asked for the original case files of their freedom suits. The Supreme Court heard their appeal in a case titled Queen v. Hepburn. It's a widely cited decision that defined the hearsay rule in American law. All I knew was that the case originated as a freedom suit by an enslaved family and that Francis Scott Key was their attorney. I was intrigued. I began to wonder what does it mean that the hearsay rule, something we see invoked often on TV and shows like Law and Order, as in objection, that's hearsay, was first defined in a case brought by an enslaved woman for her freedom. I did not know much about freedom suits. Dred Scott was one of the few I knew about. That case decided in 1857 denied Scott his freedom and is notorious, infamous in American history because it held that blacks could not sue and had no rights under the Constitution. The very existence of the Queen freedom suits showed that slaves had sued in U.S. courts long before Dred Scott. To my surprise, there were hundreds of freedom suits in the files of the Washington, D.C. Court and the Queen case that went to the Supreme Court kept four generations of freedom petitions by the family in Maryland. Other families, the Shorter's, the Mahoney's, the Butler's, the Thomas's, the Duckett's and the Bell's, filed dozens of freedom suits. Some did not succeed, but many did. Nearly half of the freedom suits were successful. These families were at the center of a story of American freedom and yet none of them appear in a history textbook. It seemed a glaring gap in our collective memory, a sobering reminder of the omission of some stories from our nation's history and the privileging of others. As I turned page after page in the vaulted reading room at the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue, it dawned on me that the freedom suits told a stunning story of resistance and described a desperate battle between enslaved families and slaveholders over the meaning of law, over the meaning of rights, over the meaning of freedom from the very moment of the nation's founding. Even before, I set out to trace all of the freedom suits back in time and, if possible, forward in time to the present to find the living descendants of those families who had sued for freedom. I traveled to Washington, D.C., Annapolis, Maryland, New Orleans, Louisiana and London, England to conduct research following the threads of the freedom suits wherever they led. I could track down these records thanks to support from the Guggenheim Foundation, support from the University of Nebraska, and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. And I could compare these cases over time, thanks to the amazing team at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities here at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. They helped design and create a digital archive of all of the freedom suits ever filed in Washington, D.C., and their predecessor cases in Maryland. There have been many people who contributed to this research, too many to name here, but I do want to say that the team at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities is unmatched among the best in the world, and I am profoundly grateful for their collaboration. Graduate students and undergraduate students here at the University of Nebraska and at other institutions have also made enormous contributions to this research. The Center's success, evident across many interdisciplinary projects, comes, I think, from the extraordinary spirit of dedication of the professional staff and the faculty and the students here at Nebraska. You can see all of the freedom suits at our website, earlywashingtondc.org. The project is ongoing. This week we are releasing 151 freedom suit cases filed by the Butler family against the leading slaveholders of Maryland. The digital archive was the first step in repairing the gaps, the silences in the documentary record. With the help of the Center's staff and students, we connected the Queen freedom suits over several decades and all of the other freedom suits we could find in the case files held at the National Archives. Tracing every relationship in these records, we could reconstruct the genealogies of these families and the network of witnesses, neighbors, jurors, and slaveholders involved in each of these lawsuits. The story begins in Prince George's County Maryland, one of the wealthiest black majority counties in the United States today. At the nation's founding, it held more than 60 percent of its total population in bondage. In May 1789, the same month that the first U.S. Congress was meeting in New York, a small group of Jesuit priests met for their annual business meeting at a plantation they called White Marsh. The Jesuits held more than 90 people in slavery at White Marsh. They had five other plantations in Maryland totaling some 11,000 acres. They enslaved more than 1,400 men, women, and children over the decades. The Jesuits decided at their May 1789 meeting to use the proceeds from their plantations to found a college at Georgetown. They also resolved for the first time to start systematically selling those enslaved people they deemed too old to work. Edward Queen was 35 years old. His mother, Phyllis, was in her 70s. Charles Mahoney was 34. His aunts and uncles were older. And Edward Queen and Charles Mahoney sued the Reverend John Ashton as the defendant slave holder in October 1791. He was the Jesuit priest who personally oversaw White Marsh as its manager. He also represented the Jesuit private trust that held the enslaved families as a collective property. It was an entity that would soon be called the corporation of Roman Catholic clergymen in Maryland. A stunning contest unfolded in Maryland and Washington D.C. as a result of these two cases, Queen V. Ashton and Mahoney V. Ashton. Challenging the very basis of slavery in American law, Charles Mahoney's case took 11 years, three jury trials, two appeals before it was finally over. In its length and complexity, Mahoney V. Ashton was like almost no other freedom suit in American history. It spanned the entire 1790s. And it turned on whether Mahoney's black ancestor came from England to Maryland as an indentured servant. And therefore on whether something called the Somerset Principle in English law made her a free person by definition. Because she had set foot on English soil, where under the Somerset Principle slavery was not legally sanctioned. If either or both of these families succeeded, hundreds of relatives could gain their freedom, whether they lived on the Jesuit plantations or not. Potentially dozens of slaveholders across Maryland would be affected. Edward Queen won his freedom suit in May 1794. And in response, slaveholders across Maryland clamped down. Some of the Queens lost their cases. And 15 years later, Priscilla Queen and Mina Queen would make the same argument that Edward Queen did. But they had that deposition, that deposition with Mary Queen's words in it. It was taken after Edward Queen's trial. A white man had testified that he knew Mary Queen. And she told him she was taken from New Spain to London by Captain Woods Rogers, whose raiding voyage was one of the most famous in English history. Because Rogers, after all, had picked up a man named Alexander Selkirk, whose story, Daniel Defoe, the novelist, would turn into Robinson Crusoe. The stakes were momentous. If the Queens could prove that their ancestor set foot in England, especially if they could prove that she came to Maryland to the colony before 1715, when the colony passed its first slave code, then they might be able to use the English precedents that had declared slavery unlawful. What if the DC court acknowledged those precedents? When Priscilla and Mina Queen's freedom suit went to trial, however, the judges never let the matter get that far. They dismissed Mary Queen's words as hearsay, secondhand testimony. Pronouncing a rule, the hearsay rule, so new that Francis Scott Key did not know how to react, and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the slaveholders. Priscilla and Mina Queen remained enslaved, and so did their children. Early in this research, I found evidence that some of my principal ancestors, the Ducats from Prince George's County, were closely connected to these events. I knew they were lawyers and judges and slaveholders. I did not know that one of the Ducats was a judge in the county court and that he presided on the day when more than 20 Queen family members, including Edward Queen's mother Phyllis, won their freedom. He allowed the hearsay evidence in the Queen cases into his courtroom. It was one of the largest single emancipations in a trial that I found in the archival records of Maryland. But I also did not know that his ambitious son got his start as a young lawyer representing the Jesuits against the Queens in some of their freedom suits. And the Ducats I found out later enslaved some of the last Queens held in Maryland in bondage. The deeper I dug into the archives, the more the parallel file on my family's history came into view. And the more I saw their actions through the lens of another family. As the full extent of their involvement became apparent, I realized I would need to confront the meaning of this history in a more personal, direct and different way. A question of freedom, the book that I've written, is the story of what became the longest and the most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history. It came from Edward Queen and Charles Mahoney and Phyllis Queen and Mina and Priscilla Queen and many others. It is also a story about the deep moral hazard of American slavery, about the contradictory impulses of people like my Ducat ancestors and people like Francis Scott Key. Key represented more than a hundred enslaved families in freedom suits. But he also defended slavery on racist grounds and eventually disparaged black freedom in all forms. And so this story is also one of acknowledging the full history of American slavery and working to repair what we have not acknowledged about our nation's history and its founding. I was left with profound questions about Queen V. Hepburn and its historic miscarriage of justice. Was it possible centuries later to verify the oral testimony in the Queen depositions that had been disallowed as inadmissible hearsay? Did the remnants of Mary Queen's story make it through the generations? A story of her freedom? Did it get passed down to her descendants today? Each piece of Mary Queen's story was like a single chain and a link of evidence. We can imagine Mary Queen telling the stories of her freedom, a series of facts about her life over and over and over again. Repeating the essential parts, the nuggets to connect the chain of evidence that she hoped would be passed on through the generations and possibly might be heard in a court. We will be joined in a moment by Melissan Short Column, a Queen descendant of the Maryland family that was sold by the Jesuits in 1838 to Louisiana sugar planters to fund the college at Georgetown. In April 2017, I went to New Orleans to find out if Mary Queen's words had been passed down through the generations, words that had been expunged by the Supreme Court decision in Queen V. Hepburn. And I met Melissan Short Column in New Orleans. Melissan, it's wonderful to see you again. Oh, well, thank you so much. What does the history of your Maryland Queen family mean to you? When we met in New Orleans, you told me a story that I'll never forget about your grandmother telling you about the Maryland family. Can you can you share with us that story? Oh, well, I grew up and I've come to so over the last three years since I've come to Georgetown since we've met. I've come to a much deeper understanding of the stories that I grew up with from my grandmother's childhood and understanding what those stories meant to her in her life and what that meant to me. And I am one of my grandmother's 10 grandchildren. So all of us, I have I have four girl first cousins, and I have six boy first cousins and all of us in our ways got this story from my grandmother. But I was the person I'm the person who's sort of bringing it forward to you, which was bringing it back really to us. So my grandmother, I grew up hearing stories of my grandmother's life in the country with her family. She was she was her mama's first child. She was born into a family that had been enslaved. Her grandmother, Eve Mahoney, was born into slavery in 1856. Her grandmother, her great grandmother, Mary Ellen Queen had been born in Maryland. And my grandmother was born into a house and into a family that was inhabited by young people in 1838 who were part of the Georgetown sale. So the old people in her family when she was born in 1896 were young people in 1838. So she grew up in a family of people who shared their childhood stories and talked about being enslaved because this was the life they lived. There was no running from it or hiding it or acting like it didn't happen. So I grew up hearing stories from my grandmother's childhood about her family in Maryland, about their being so coming to Louisiana as free people, people who had been freed in Maryland and coming from a family that had been manumitted and gone to court, and that Francis Scott King was the family lawyer. It's a great story. And when you and I met that March in New Orleans and we sat down not knowing one another and you were asking for information from descendants of what they had heard in their families, I shared with you a 300 year remnant of my family's story that continued through displacement, separation from family and 180 years of disconnection. At one point in our conversation, you turned to me and you said, our ancestors are calling our names. I've never forgotten that moment. What did you mean? What were you saying? I think I feel I am here as a representative of my family and families like mine, the families you write about in your book. And this has always been part of our American history, part of our economic history, our legal history, our medical history, our labor history, our freedom history as Americans that has not been and I won't use the word convenient because it was not convenient. It was the deliberate decision to leave out very important players in the American story for the people to know who these builders are. There's this saying, you know, the stone that the the the stone that the builders rejected. Well, we are not that stone. We are the builders and the stones don't know who we are. Thank you. Thank you, Mellie. That was that was wonderful. After meeting Melisand and the other Queen descendants in New Orleans, I could see that we would need new ways to bring these stories to life. By this time, dozens of descendants of the families who sued for freedom had contacted our center at Nebraska as they reconstructed family genealogies. The website hosted here, early Washington DC dot org has been accessed 1.4 million times in the first six months of 2020. In 2019, the site had 2.4 million hits and more than 25,000 unique visitors encouraged by Melisand and other members of the Queen family, especially Letitia Clark and Guilford Queen. We hosted an exhibit booth at the annual Queen family reunion in Queen's Town, Maryland. This was in July of 2018. We compiled lists of the freedom suits by the principal families who sued for freedom and shared those with family members at the Queen family reunion at Queen's Town, so that they could track down the original records if they wanted to in the Maryland archives. But how could we hear the testimony of Mary Queen or other freedom seekers? How could we hear that testimony directly? How could we repair the narrative of a family that had been silenced in history? We needed a form of history that was animated with real people, real stories, real voices. I turned to my colleagues in other disciplines for help right here at the University of Nebraska. Michael Burton, a visual effects artist and animator in textiles and Waqeel Dreher, screenwriter, director, professor of African American literature here in English. And together we formed a partnership to use all of the available evidence from the archives and from oral history to create dramatic documentaries of the situations that the Queens and other families experienced. With support from the Office of Research, we produced an 11-minute live action animated short film about Anne Williams, whose freedom suit was one of the defining moments in American history. And we are currently producing a feature length live action animated film called The Bell Affair about the Bell family's quest for freedom in Washington DC. Over 40 actors are in the cast, production companies in New York and Los Angeles, led by alumni of the University of Nebraska, are working with us. We are building 3D models to recreate the cityscape of Washington DC before the Civil War, places like the Navy are the US Capitol and Lafayette Square. The central premise of our collaborative and creative research is that our narrative of the nation's founding needs to include the stories of particular families. The national imagination still sees slavery as some kind of aberration, a detour from the true story of the nation's founding. And in that view, enslaved families remain largely nameless and faceless. Victims of a long ago system since disappeared. But this needs to change. Their descendants, their histories, their families live. And until we reckon with this history more widely, Americans will continue to live in separate spheres of historical understanding. That's a condition that more than anything limits our ability to come to terms with the past. And in such a situation, we need to hear the words of Mary Queen and so many others. We cannot, of course, do anything to change what happened long ago. But we can change the way we understand what happened and what it means to us today in the present. Thank you for listening and watching. Well, Will, thank you so much for sharing the compelling story of Mary Queen and her fight for freedom. And many thanks to her family as well as you pointed out for keeping that story alive and for centuries that passed so that we could still hear it. This research certainly reminds us of who the builders of our country were and the appeal to the courts for freedom from slavery as an important part of American history, as you pointed out, even in those last remarks. I understand that this is one of several families stories that are going to be told in your book, a question of freedom. So to be released next month, tell us about it. Yes, the book is published by Yale University Press and it'll come out in November this year. So November 24th and it chronicles the stories of all of the families who sued for freedom from Prince George's County, you know, from 1789 right through to the American Civil War. And so many of them won their freedom. Many, however, did not. And they faced multiple phases of litigation in trying to sue for their freedom. The other thing I would say about the book is it really shows how intergenerational this pursuit of freedom was. The Queens are a good example, but all of the other families as well. They sue and keep this knowledge of the law and the Constitution alive across many generations and in challenge slavery across multiple generations. We're looking forward to reading it. I'm looking forward to reading it as well. And I was sharing with Will as we were listening to the lecture here that, you know, I actually lived in Prince George's County, Maryland at one point in my career and familiar with the landscapes there that tell this story or part of this story as well. Now, I know we have questions from our viewers. The lecture. Thank you for being here with us today. We had really good attendance online in this time of COVID-19. And I know you may have questions that you wish to submit and to have a chance for Will to address. So please feel free to do so by using the bottom of your screen in the chat function there or by emailing UNL research at UNL.edu. And we've had a few Will that have come in. So we'll go right to them. First question is what's the story of the Bell Affair? Why make this into a feature film? Yeah, the Bell family sues for their freedom in 1835. And they are pursuing freedom across several different members of the family. So Daniel Bell sues for his freedom. He's a blacksmith at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. And he's part of a circle of blacksmiths and other African American workers, enslaved workers and free black workers at the Navy Yard who also have sued for freedom in the past. And Daniel is attempting to free his whole family, his wife, Mary, and their six children. And he negotiates with the white man who enslaves Mary Bell and the six children. And in that negotiation, he receives a deed of manumission essentially for the emancipation of Mary and the six children. But the white man who wrote out that deed of manumission was on his deathbed and he died two days later. And his wife contests that deed in court and tries to overturn it, suggesting that he was not of sound mind. And so there's a long legal battle over Mary Bell and the six Bell children and their claim to freedom that unfolds over the 1830s. Ultimately, the Bell family loses their freedom suit. Mary Bell loses her suit in D.C. Court. In fact, the jury agrees that the white man was not of sound mind and therefore the deed was not legitimate. And at that point, Daniel Bell initiates what becomes the largest escape attempt in American history. It is Daniel Bell and his family that organized the attempted escape on the Pearl. One of the most important attempts to escape slavery in American history. They are recaptured. The Pearl sails down the Potomac River. You saw some of the scenes of the animation of that. And they are hauled back to Washington, D.C. And many of them are sold to the Deep South to planters, cotton and sugar planters. And Mary and Daniel Bell face this just horrific choice. Which children can they possibly arrange to purchase their freedom for? And which can they not and they will be sold into slavery? And so the story is really the story of Mary and Daniel Bell's struggle for freedom, but also the story of their family, the lives of the family. Francis Scott Key, a familiar name to all of us. Why did Francis Scott Key get involved in these lawsuits? Well, that was one of the questions I had when I started this research. I knew that Key was involved in the Queen case, but I didn't know much about Key. Of course, I knew that he authored the Star-Spangled Banner, our national anthem, but I did not know much about his lawyering or about his family, really. Key's uncle, Philip Barton Key, represented the Queens in the 1790s in Maryland. And Francis Scott Key went to college at St. John's College in Annapolis. And he studied, he hung out at the law offices of his uncle, Philip Barton Key, and he takes up these cases that his uncle sort of hands over to him. But Francis Scott Key's involvement grew over the decades. He represented over 100 enslaved families in freedom suits. And the Queens, he represented Ann Williams in her major case in 1832. And so he's present through all of these freedom suits. The difficulty is that Key, also by the mid-1830s, has begun to talk publicly about black people as not being worthy of freedom. And so there's this deep contradiction at the heart of Key's involvement and I try in the book to unravel that, to try and understand Francis Scott Key and his family, as well as the enslaved families that he represented. So when and how did slaves first become aware that they could sue for their freedoms? Well, there were freedom suits in the colonial period going back to the early 18th century in a number of the colonies, including Maryland. In Maryland, the provincial courts had shut down these freedom suits. But after the American Revolution, the Maryland legislature passes legislation that explicitly allows freedom suits. Petitions for freedom could be tried in the general court in Annapolis. And so it was a matter in Maryland of statutory law. The statutes of Maryland allowed freedom suits. But there were freedom suits much earlier. So the families and the descendants of this family, so when you approached them for the project, how did they generally react? Well, they were very deeply interested in this history. And they were excited about it. We happened to be in a moment where much of this history is being reckoned with nationally. And that was true when I really was writing the book and researching the book in 2015 and 16 and 17 and 18. And so, you know, the reception I had was uniformly one of a support and interest. There is no question that the descendants of these families want greater honesty about American slavery. They want these stories to get out and to be widely heard. And so I would also say that these families, the descendants of these families were aware that their families were at the center of an American history, a story of American freedom. And they're aware that that story has largely been forgotten or set aside. And so I think that when I approached them about this research, their interest also was aligned with mine in putting these families really at the center of the founding in a way that tells a much more truthful and honest history about our nation. So this question comes from Bob Wilhelm. Okay. He congratulates you on the lecture as well today. I enjoyed your lecture he says and found many interesting points. Could you talk a little more about organized efforts, for example, the creation of Bates College or the community in Philadelphia that James Fortin was a part of? Absolutely. There were numerous efforts in the whole period from the 1820s especially to the 1850s to try to build up abolitionist movements in the north and build up abolitionist efforts to overturn slavery across the south. James Fortin was a sailmaker and a wealthy Philadelphia African American leader in the African American community in Philadelphia, leading voice of abolition. Fortin and others represent this northern free black community. But we also want to remember that free blacks were increasingly a large proportion of the population in Maryland and in Virginia in the Chesapeake. And one of the things that I think we have to reckon with is how important it was for these families to stay in place, to stay in their home region with their families. So it was not always the case that enslaved people wished to run away to the north, so to speak, to Philadelphia which certainly was a beacon of freedom. But it's also the case that enslaved families sought to liberate themselves and remain rooted in place so that they could build their family communities. And this is what these lawsuits are really about, is the across-generational effort to free families and to remain rooted and not to be swept up into the slave trade, for example. A couple of related questions to the lawsuits. So one's kind of a process question and one's more of a what question. So in the lawsuits filed by slave families, what were some of the claims filed against the slaveholders? And a related question, what was the process for a slave to connect with a lawyer and pay them? Wouldn't their owners object to that? How did that happen? That's a great question. The first part of the question about what kinds of freedom suits were there, many of the initial freedom suits that I studied from the 1780s, 1790s, 1800s were based on ancestry. These were suits based on dissent from a free woman. Some of those suits were based on dissent from a free white woman, but some of those suits, like the Queens, was based on dissent from a free woman of color, or in the case of the Mahonis, a free black woman who had spent time in England and came to the Maryland colony ostensibly as an indentured servant whose indenture was later disregarded, you know, and she was effectively enslaved and her children's children and so forth. So the suits were initially, many of them in the 1790s, about heredity and about ancestry. Now, once the Queen V. Hepburn case is decided, and hearsay testimony is no longer allowed in American courts, it is very difficult to prove ancestry because the testimony would usually be, well, I heard so and so say that she was a descendant, a child of Mary Queen, right? So all that testimony being ruled inadmissible pretty much ended the freedom suits based on ancestry. The whole next round of the freedom suits that I write about in the book are based on other kinds of claims, violation of the law of importation. If slaveholders brought enslaved people into the District of Columbia illegally, then enslaved people were automatically free as a result, but they had to bring a case, they had to bring a freedom suit, and they did. They won many of those, they lost some. They also began bringing freedom suits on the basis of provisions in a will that then go unfulfilled. If a slaveholder makes a will that bequest freedom to an enslaved person, but their heirs contest it, then it becomes a matter of law. And so the point here is that when enslaved families were savvy to this, they had a lot of legal acumen and knowledge, and they maintained these connections with lawyers. You asked about the lawyers. The lawyers in Maryland were paid by the court in these cases. In Virginia, or parts of the District of Columbia that were under Virginia law, it worked a little differently. That is Alexandria, Virginia. But basically while some of them were pro bono free counsel, enslaved families also hired attorneys. And they did so because in many cases they had been rented to employers in Washington, D.C., including the federal government. And they were able to keep their wages. And so they would in fact then go hire attorneys. And I think we've missed all of this in our understanding, and I think it's so important to reframe the way we understand enslaved people and enslaved families in this history. Last question. Can you say more about the Jesuits role in enslaving African-Americans? When did they decide to sell off enslaved people and why? Well, the Jesuits are certainly central to this story. They enslave Africans across the South America and in Maryland as well. At one point in the 18th century the society of Jesus is the largest slave holder in the world really. In Maryland they inherit property and inherit land and enslaved people. And then they hold those people and the land effectively in a trust that they manage through this whole period. They go back and forth on the idea of whether to liberate all of the enslaved on their plantations. In 1814 they come close. They then turn back away from that in 1820. And by 1838 they decide to sell over 200 enslaved men, women and children to Louisiana sugar planters, including a member of the Key Family. So it's a deal that really takes place in Washington D.C. And the purpose of it is to shore up the finances of Georgetown and the archdiocese. And there's a way in which the Jesuits really, I think, are struggling with the same central issue that is the United States enslavement of people. And that is the issue of slavery. And they go back and forth on it, but they eventually sell. Have there been any reparations by Georgetown? Yes. We heard from Melisand Short-Column on the program. She has been a recent undergraduate student at Georgetown and helped lead the effort to pass a student a fee that would go to reparations. And so there have been a number of actions that Georgetown has taken to try to address the historical trauma and the legacy of the sale in 1838. Well, very compelling stories, Will. And thank you for a wonderful Nebraska lecture. As we said at the top of the hour and the beginning of the lecture, it's one of the greatest honors by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to be selected by your peers to present a Nebraska lecture. So congratulations on a great one. Thank you for all of your body of scholarship in this important area and that of your colleagues who have worked together with you. Well done. Thank you.