ROSE, a WOMAN OF COLOUR: A Slave's Struggle for Freedom in the Courts of Kentucky

by Arnold Taylor

This book is the true story of Rose Gatliff, a slave who used the courts of Kentucky to wrest freedom from those who held her family in bondage. Despite being held in a slave State and despite her rights being judged by white, slaveholding men, she prevailed. Her persistence, determination and intelligence made her, as one witness phrased it, "the best lawyer" her family had.This is also the story of the witnesses for and against Rose, all white, who speak to us in their own words, taken from case documents in the State Archives of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.Follow Rose as she is taken from her mother in Virginia to Kentucky and passed from Master to Master until 1833, when she began a legal process covering four States, multiple Kentucky counties, four trials, an appeal and nearly nineteen years and see why her descendants should be proud of her.

146 pages, Paperback

First published June 10, 2008

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important short read of court documents. But not really literature... So the stars are for content not style or writing ability.

[Thorn MotherIssues · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't a book you read for its lyrical quality, but the story itself was fascinating. From the legal record, Taylor pieces together the story of Rose, who was held as a slave in Kentucky and sued for her freedom in the 1830s and '40s. I really appreciated learning about the legal intricacies of race at the time, that if Rose were found to be white or American Indian (following claims that her mother was Cherokee or Chickamauga) she would automatically be a free person, as would her children since children followed the legal state of their mothers, but until she was legally considered free and non-black she had no right to speak in a court case involving white people. America's famed litigious society was clearly in full swing even in the mid-1800s and I'd love to read more about cases like this one. I'm very glad I read this.