“Did she win?” (239). The question dogged W. Caleb McDaniel from his first encounter with Harriet Wood in a clipping in the Ohio Ripley Bee. Born into slavery in Kentucky, freed as a young woman in Ohio, kidnapped by her employer while on an errand, sold literally down the Mississippi river, “refugeed” to Texas during the Civil War, coerced into contracted labor after the war, and finally freed of her master in 1868, Wood ultimately sued the man who had reenslaved her for the intervening seventeen years of lost wages. The narrative alone should have some film producer on the phone to Rice University, where McDaniel teaches. As it is, Sweet Taste of Liberty is a master class in micro-historical storytelling and method, with short and focussed chapters, writing that conveys complex ideas in plain language, and an Epilogue, Appendix, and companion website of sources addressing the problems that McDaniel faced in research, all of which he rounds out with an implicit awareness that these events, seemingly obscure and distant, have long-lasting ramifications.

Two separate interviews with Wood, given later in her life, form the skeleton of Sweet Taste of Liberty. From there McDaniel fleshes out her life from census and county records, then secondary historical literature. He chooses not to limit the story to Wood, however, but also tells the tale of her nemesis, Zebulon Ward, the man whom she sued for robbing her of the most productive years of her working life. Ward purchased her from her kidnappers then later sold her to one of the nation's richest planters, who held her on one of his cotton plantations outside Natchez, Mississippi. Ward, a man of harsh and nefarious methods, went on to serve as a pro-slavery Unionist state representative in Kentucky during the Civil War, and grew wealthy on racehorses and, more importantly, convict leasing in both the ante- and postbellum years. Because the action takes place in border regions – in Cincinnati, Kentucky, and Texas – McDaniel demonstrates ways in which kidnapping, fugitive slave cases, freedom suits, and the Freedman's Bureau all operated when the players were far from any people with the resources to make their case cause célèbre and where African Americans were presumed property, and Sweet Taste of Liberty joins the body of literature showing how common such incidents were.

If there must be a criticism of a book that has already numbered among the impressive short list of finalists for the 2020 Lincoln Prize, then it lies in the thinness of women's historiography in a book about a woman. That is not to say that McDaniel ignores this fact. He devotes a chapter to the parentage of Wood's son, born after her kidnapping, and remains cognizant of the differences between the experiences of men and women. Still, the care with which McDaniel has reconstructed the complexities of freedom suits, Reconstruction in Texas, and the vagaries of the cotton economy, among so many other aspects of her story and Ward's, might leave some readers wishing he had teased out more about gender. White women played key roles in Wood's freedom and kidnapping, and Wood emerges as a physically and intellectually forceful woman with a strong sense of her entitlement to freedom and restitution for its theft.

In the end, “Did she win?” proved a bigger question than one court case. Yes, Wood did; although she received only $2,500 of the $200,000 for which she filed suit because the judge had instructed the jury not to grant a large award in order to discourage precedent. While that was the largest settlement ever, McDaniel leaves his audience pondering the potential compounded wealth robbed from more than four million people. Economic racial inequality could have had a different history had former slaves received even the fraction that Wood did. After all, her small but hard-won settlement went to purchase a home for her son, who then leveraged that property to put himself through law school and build his own practice and provide his own family with a financially secure future. Had such cases been part of public policy, or had such settlements been widespread and with more just reward, perhaps Ward's model of profiteering from mass incarceration would not have become the path of “justice” in the United States.