Love & Whiskey

the Supreme Court heard the Dred Scott case. They later ruled that no Black person, enslaved or free, in a Southern or Northern state, could be considered a United States citizen. It was a pivotal time in American history. The Missouri Compromise—which banned slavery in new territories above the southern border of Missouri—was invalidated.

“slave holders were the only men that could make enough money to do anything.”

The white man behind it was Elihu Embree, an iron manufacturer and former slave owner who had evolved, at age thirty, into an abolitionist. Elihu mailed his newspapers to Southern politicians, intent on persuading them to end the horrors of slavery.

she knew the Lynchburg newspapers—the Sentinel, the Moore County Pioneer—had, historically, rarely included Black people, unless they committed a crime. Occasionally a notice about a marriage license given to a Black couple would run.

Because it was so difficult to secure patents, some enslavers are believed to have surreptitiously patented the inventions of their enslaved people. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was said to have actually been invented by an enslaved man named Sam. Black people’s mass exclusion from the right to own one’s own ideas has had consequences that have reverbe

I believe who you partner with in life is one of the determining factors between success and mediocrity.

Annie Bell Green Eady, although she gave herself the nickname Mammie and went by it her whole life. She was Nearest’s granddaughter.

Just prior to the start of the Civil War, enslaved people accounted for 55 percent of the value of personal property in Middle Tennessee. The area held nearly 308,000 inhabitants, or 28 percent of the state’s total population, and about four in ten residents were enslaved. When the state lifted its ban on the import of enslaved people in 1855, Nash

This truth cut across race; even the wealthiest free Black man in Tennessee, Sherrod Bryant, owned enslaved people who worked his seven hundred acres. “I think at some point some of the members [of the family] might not have looked upon it very favorably, but the more we discuss it, the more we suddenly realize that to gain wealth during that time,