A MADMAN'S WILL

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.