دانلود رمان انگلیسی “آزادی از دست رفته، آزادی به دست آمده”

On March 27, 1829, a wealthy white planter and entrepreneur named Richard Fordham purchased four enslaved African Americans from a woman named Isabella Perman. One of them was my great-great-grandfather, a boy called Harry. This transaction in human 􀐜esh, as with many thousands of other such sales over nearly two centuries, took place in Charleston, the metropolis in the Low Country of South Carolina that was the port of entry for an estimated 40 percent of all enslaved Africans brought to toil in this country. A document recording the sale was 􀐙led with the South Carolina secretary of state several days later, on April 7. It does not say where in Charleston the sale took place—on the steps of the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon perhaps, or at the Cooper River docks, or in one of the thriving markets where people were bought and sold. The individuals bought by Fordham are listed as “a Negro boy named Harry and a Negro woman named Jenny and her two children named Hager and Margaret.” For the lot, Fordham paid $1,080. Founded in 1670 as Charles Towne by English colonists from Bermuda, Charleston occupies a narrow peninsula 􀐜anked by two navigable rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper. The rivers meet at the city’s southern tip, which is protected by a wide and deep natural harbor; Charleston could not have been better situated to become a center of seafaring commerce. In 1829 it was a bustling place with a population of nearly thirty thousand, the most important Atlantic port in the South and the sixth-largest city in the nation, behind only New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and New Orleans.