The Accidental Slaveowner

This extraordinary book is one of the very best—and certainly the most original—anthropological and historical studies of slavery I have read. Through a combination of superb ethnography, original analysis, and painstaking archival work, Auslander tells an important and utterly compelling story. Thoughtfully organized and beautifully written, The Accidental Slaveowner will be an essential source for everyone interested in slavery and in the history of race relationships in the United States.

* author of Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone *

This stunning book applies anthropological perspectives on myth and kinship to the pervasive legacy of slavery, which still dominates American understandings of race, humanity, freedom. Auslander's skilled collaboration with the descendants of 'Miss Kitty,' sometimes called 'the person who caused the civil war,' brings the unexpected story of her family to light, forging firm links across separations of black and white, slave and master, past and present. In the process, haunting fallacies are exorcised, and nagging paradoxes of blood and betrayal find voice, making possible new lines of debate, and novel pursuits of understanding, even justice.

* University of Chicago *

The Accidental Slaveowner is a beautifully written account of the complex ways in which family and institutional histories and memories of slavery are told and retold by blacks and whites in this country. At its heart is the important national story of the split of the Methodist Episcopal Church into northern and southern factions over the meaning of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. Mark Auslander has taken this institutional history and uncovered the personal stories of families and communities who felt and still feel the reverberations of that conflict down to the present day. With a detective’s attention to detail and a novelist’s love of people and their stories, Auslander has written a lucid, passionate work.

* Emory University *

In 1844, a dispute over ownership of an enslaved woman named Catherine Boyd split the American Methodist Church, a fateful step on the road to secession and Civil War. In this beautiful, haunting book, Mark Auslander peels back the layers of history, memory, and myth that have grown up around 'Miss Kitty,' taking us to the heart of our nation’s conflicted racial past and present.

* Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History, Stanford University *

Auslander’s work demonstrates how the Andrew/Kitty myth changed over time and the manner in which different versions of the story divided the white and black populations of Oxford, Georgia, where Bishop Andrew served as president of the Emory College Board of Trustees. The ending is particularly poignant and clearly demonstrates the power that involving the public in one’s own history can have.

You will want to read The Accidental Slaveowner for the rest of the story!

* United Methodist Reporter *

Though this is a scholarly work, it offers a fascinating glimpse into a slice of Georgia history that tends to be interpreted very differently by white people and by black people.

* Atlanta Magazine *

[B]y tracing the current descendants of Kitty, the author has made a contribution to African American genealogy, no small undertaking.

* Journal of American History