The other Profiles in the Print and E-Book are listed at the end of this preview.
Book Description
The Liberty Tree: One Hundred Faces of America is an illustrated history of Liberty in America.
Liberty, in turn, is "the ability to make our own life decisions according to our own sense of what is best."
This book tells the story of Liberty in America through profiles of one hundred Americans.
The story begins with a native woman meeting English settlers on the East Coast in 1610. It continues to a seven-year-old child today, blissfully unaware of how fragile his home and family are.
In between we meet Americans great and small, famous, infamous, and unknown, all playing their own role in this dance of American Liberty.
We meet those enslaved and those who enslaved them, those who sacrificed for Liberty and those who fought against it. We encounter stories of those who escaped bonds to become free, and those who spent their liberty in service to others.
The Liberty Tree ends with a note of cautious hope. Liberty has deep roots among us and its future may be bright...if we allow it to be.
Meet these one hundred Americans, and discover your own place among them!
"This is a brilliant book! It has 100 portraits or vignettes, each about a different American from the 1600s through this month. Some of them are known to history, others are obscure, ordinary folk. John has done a spectacular job."
Rev. Joshua Barron Kenya
"I love the imagery; it gives that Eastern Orthodox vibe.... The stories are short enough to digest, potent enough to provide the gist of each life, and allow space for reflection and interpretation..."
Nathan B. King United States
“Contrarian to its core, The Liberty Tree is a pointillist masterwork bearing out the fine line between oppression and freedom. After letting us run our fingers across the bark and smell the sweet perfume of the sap, Dr. Cunyus leaves us wanting to know more of the liberty of days gone by and, if God be willing, to have some of our own today.”
Samuel L. Brown United States
“Profound!
Wish all of us [could] read his three paragraphs, contemplate and internalise it.
His scholarship, true love for America, “American Liberty” and seeking good in all of us can be the much needed catalyst to regain ourselves!
That is if we want to!”
Moazam Syed United States
I wrote it because I love my country. I'm a Dad and I've been a Pastor, and I know loving someone doesn't mean you like everything that happens, or you agree with everything that's done. It means that, whatever happens, you have the loved one's best interests at heart. I love America. I have its best interests at heart, as far as I understand them. I understand others may see things differently, but this is my country. Its success is my success. I don't have to be anti-anything to be pro-American.
I wrote it because I believe American Liberty is a gift to the world. Liberty is the idea that each individual has the ability to make their own life decisions according to what seems best to them. Of course there are limits to Liberty. There always have been and there always will be. Sometimes we've made a mess of it, and sometimes we still do. But all in all, American Liberty has been a tremendous success. I favor working to keep it so.
And I wrote it because my background teaches me to look for the good in everyone. Sometimes you have to look really hard, but there's always something. We live in an age when everyone seems so critical of everyone else. We spend so much time and energy tearing down what we don't like in others that we hardly get around to building up what we do. I want to step off that Merry-go-round. I want to seek and speak the good, even when I don't agree. I want to find a better way to good that includes us all.
The original Liberty Tree was an enormous elm which stood near Boston Common. It was planted in 1646 by the original wave of English settlers in what was then the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The tree grew with the settlement.
Its association with liberty began in 1765. The British Parliament, far away across the Atlantic, determined to claw back some of its huge expenses in the recently-completed French and Indian War. The war permanently ended French threats to Britain's American colonies, and guaranteed the colonists a greater measure of security against Indian raids as well.
It seemed only natural in distant London that those who benefited from the war should help pay its expenses. Parliament imposed the Stamp Tax on colonial commerce to do just that. The colonists, however, weren't consulted.
One principle in English law was that English citizens could not be taxed unless their representatives approved. The colonists at that time considered themselves English, possessing all the rights English people in the native land did. Yet they had no representation in the British Parliament. The cry of “No taxation without representation” boiled up as colonial fury against the Stamp Act ignited.
In 1765, a group called “The Sons of Liberty” rallied around the huge elm tree near Boston Common for the first time. It soon became a symbol of resistance. In 1775, open warfare began between the American colonists and their British overlords. British forces initially held Boston, before George Washington's Continental Army outflanked them on Dorchester Heights and forced them to withdraw.
Before their withdrawal was complete, British loyalists cut down the Liberty Tree, hoping to strike a blow against the movement it had come to represent. Thus, the original Liberty Tree passed into history. The symbol, however, endured.
This book tells the partial stories of one hundred who have been part of the story of liberty in North America. Many of those pictured did NOT experience liberty. Some actively sought to take liberty away from others. The tree in this picture reflects that, all signs of living boughs and leaves absent. It may be that this Liberty Tree, like the original in Boston, is dead.
But many of those pictured here DID attain liberty. Some of them managed to survive terrible hardships in doing so. Others endured wars and terrible violence on behalf of (or at times against) the cause of liberty. Some are heroes. Some are survivors. Some, likely, are villains.
But liberty's story isn't over. Perhaps the Liberty Tree pictured here is dead and the ideal was an illusion. Perhaps the villains won.
Then again, elm trees are not evergreens. They lose their leaves in Autumn, remain bare and empty in Winter, then spring to life again in Spring. Despite an imported disease that killed three in four of North America's elms in the 20th century, the species survives.
Perhaps this Liberty Tree is one of the survivors. Perhaps it merely waits for Springtime and the struggles have not been in vain. Perhaps the ideal of liberty lives on.
Kittaptoni “Kitty” Unami was a Lenape (Delaware) woman whose exact dates of birth and death are lost to history. She lived during the 17th Century, near the northeast coast of North America on the Atlantic Ocean.
The Lenape people's first contact with English settlers took place along what is now the Delaware River, in the Eastern U. S. State of Delaware, in 1610.
The English couldn't pronounce “Lenape” (It's "luh-NAY-pay") There are various versions of how the Lenape came to be called Delaware.
As a prologue to the story of Liberty, today's Delaware nations are based in Oklahoma, half a continent away from their East Coast homelands — survivors of multiple forced relocations.
Lots of folks moved west.
Some did it by their own free choice, seeking liberty.
Some did it to build better lives for themselves and their children.
Conrad Heyer lived during the Revolutionary War period in the British colony of Delaware, not far from where Kitty Unami's ancestors first encountered English settlers. His ancestors, however, came from Germany rather than England. Most of the early German settlers came to the colonies to escape religious violence in their homeland.
When the Revolutionary War broke out, Captain Jonathan Caldwell recruited Conrad and many others like him into the First Delaware regiment of the Continental Army. They were crack troops and played a crucial role in the army's narrow escape from the British in New York. By the end of 1776, Washington had called on them many times, and they had risen to the occasion.
So it was that on Christmas night, 1776, Conrad and his Regiment crossed the Delaware River with Washington from Pennsylvania into New Jersey. They fell upon the unsuspecting Hessian garrison holding the town of Trenton for the British, scoring a dramatic American victory at a moment when patriot morale was at a low point.
The Hessians themselves were Germans, hired as soldiers by the British king to help fight his war against the colonists. When the war ended, most of their survivors returned to Germany. Quite a few of them, though, chose to stay after the war in the new nation they had fought to oppose.
Heyer survived the war and returned home to Delaware, yet there was an irony in his returning. Having fought a war ostensibly for Liberty, he lived in a jurisdiction that denied Liberty to many of its residents. Delaware not only permitted the practice of slavery, it made the condition hereditary. If an enslaved person gave birth to a child in Delaware or any other slaveholding State, the child, too, was enslaved.
The State of Delaware was south of the Mason-Dixon line, which divided the early United States between slaveholding and non-slaveholding regions. North of the line, New York began the process of formal abolition as early as 1799. Many of the other "free" States followed suit, though slavery remained legal in some until final Abolition in 1865.
Most of the States south of the line joined the Confederacy during the Secession Crisis of 1861 after Abraham Lincoln's first election as President. They feared the Anti-Slavery platform of that era's Republican Party and the future of their economic model. Delaware remained in the Union. A Civil War between the northern and southern States raged from 1861-1865.
The Union Army liberated enslaved persons in the territories it reconquered from the States in rebellion beginning in 1863, following Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Slaveholding in Delaware did not end until the 13th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution came into effect in 1865, after the war ended.
Conrad Heyer spent his long life enjoying his personal liberty, no doubt aware of those denied it among his neighbors. The contradiction between Liberty and slavery cut to the heart of the American story from its earliest days.
This is Simon Dansk. At least that is what his captors called him. He did not come to this liberty party by choice.
As a youth, he was betrayed by a neighboring clan, kidnapped, and sold into slavery. He survived the infamous Middle Passage and was brought in chains to the island of St. Jan in the Danish West Indies. He had been trafficked as part of the lethal “triangular trade,” which brought sugar from the Caribbean to Europe, firearms and other manufactured goods from Europe to Africa, and human captives from Africa to the Caribbean.
Simon was held in forced labor under grueling conditions on a sugar cane plantation for the rest of his life. His homeland, his tribe, his family, and even his given name disappeared under the grip of slavery. The bankruptcy of the Danish West Indies Company in 1754 merely led to the islands being taken over directly by the Danish crown.
He died in 1790, having lost touch with all parts of his past except for his longing for Liberty.
Denmark abolished slavery in the islands in 1848 and sold the islands to the United States in 1917. Many of Simon’s descendants remain there to this day.
Nancy Daniels, so named by her captors, was born among the Igbo people in West Africa around 1751. Kidnapped as a young teenager, she was trafficked into slavery and also survived the infamous “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic. She never saw her family, people, or homeland again.
As a young woman just entering prime childbearing years, she was an especially valuable “commodity” when sold to a family of English settlers in Barbados. She survived wars, revolutions, and hurricanes, living long enough to be emancipated when the British Empire abolished slavery in 1834. At that point, though, she had no means of returning home.
Her photo was taken in 1855, making her one of the first women of color captured on film. She died shortly thereafter, her Igbo name lost to history.
Captain Shapley Prince Ross (1811-1889) was a pioneer settler of Texas. Born in Kentucky, he moved with his family first to Missouri, where he got married. Ross emigrated to what was then the Republic of Texas in 1839.
In those tumultuous years, Ross settled his family first in Milam County, northeast of Austin. After serving on the committee to choose the Milam County seat, he moved briefly to Austin. Given the violent nature of life on the frontier, Ross joined the Texas Rangers, a state-sponsored militia for collective defense. He rose to the rank of Captain, serving under Jack Hayes.
Elected a Ranger captain by his fellow Rangers, he was assigned to defend settlements near the Brazos River, a hundred miles northeast of Austin. Ross built the first house in what became Waco. As the town grew up around him, he built the first hotel there as well. His duties expanded over the years to include being postmaster, Indian agent, and cattle drover.
Despite the isolation of the frontier, Ross was determined that his children receive an education. His son, Lawrence Sullivan "Sul" Ross, graduated from Baylor University, which was chartered in 1845 by the last Congress of the Republic of Texas prior to annexation by the United States. The younger Ross went on to live a storied life in the emergence of post Civil War Texas.
Shapley Ross owned slaves in Missouri prior to his relocation to Texas, according to U. S. Census data. He does not seem to have continued the practice after his move to Texas, according to the last pre-Civil War U. S. Census. Though Sul Ross, Shapley's son, rose to prominence in the Confederate Army, the younger Ross showed a marked interest in the welfare and education of Black Texans during his service both as governor of the state and as President of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (today's Texas A&M University).
However fitfully, however hindered by the assumptions and prejudices of the times, Shapley Ross seems to have watered the Liberty Tree during his long life in Texas.
Jack Merrifield was born in 1792 in Kentucky. A veteran of the War of 1812, he served under Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans. After the war, Merrifield returned to Kentucky and started a family.
A cholera epidemic killed his wife and daughter in Kentucky, leading Jack to send his sons to Texas to scout a place to resettle. The Merrifields arrived around 1847, and Jack's first property deed in Texas was filed in 1851. Jack built an additional room onto the two-room log cabin already on the property to house his second wife and eleven surviving children.
Merrifield spent the rest of his life there, a couple of miles west of the Trinity River in the heart of what became the city of Oak Cliff. In 1903, Oak Cliff was annexed into Dallas, across the river on the east bank of the Trinity.
Sometimes, Liberty looks like a three-room cabin housing thirsteen souls on the edge of the frontier.
Samuel Sharpe was born into slavery on the British-ruled island of Jamaica in 1801. The British Empire had long profited from the sugar produced under the plantation system maintained there. By the time of Sharpe's birth, however, British public opinion was turning against slavery.
Sharpe came into contact with Baptist missionaries from England as a youth. He was baptized and allowed by his owner to learn to read and write. In short order, Sharpe mastered these skills and became an avid reader and teacher of the Bible in the Jamaican Baptist Churches.
Sharpe, convinced by the New Testament that slavery was un-Christian, shared that message in the churches with other enslaved persons. He closely followed the debates reported in Jamaican newspapers as Britain's distant Parliament discussed slavery.
At Christmas 1832, Sharpe organized a work stoppage in response to those enslaved being denied the customary full holiday break. Because of his influence, many other enslaved Baptists decided to join the protest. On Christmas Day, the protest escalated. While Sharpe and those with him only envisioned a work stoppage, many others rebelled violently against their condition.
The local militia quickly put down the rebellion by force. Sharpe, as the leader, was arrested, tried, convicted, and hanged, despite pleas on his behalf by both white and Black Baptist leaders. He reportedly said on his way to execution, “I would rather hang on those gallows than live as a slave.”
Shaken by the violence in Jamaica, Britain's Parliament banned slavery empire-wide in 1834.
Deacon Samuel Sharpe watered the Liberty Tree with his own blood.
Will Turner was born into slavery in the 1830s in North Carolina. At age 16, he escaped into deep swampland, hunted by dogs and men alike. He endured six weeks of hardship before reaching a port of relative safety.
John Watson entered this story in 1808 in North Carolina. His father died when he was six. He and his mother moved to Tennessee in 1826.
John began his move to Texas in 1849 as a married man with many children. He built a houseboat to hold his family and possessions and used it to float down the Tennessee River to Arkansas. The Watsons planted a crop at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, that year, and arrived in East Texas in 1850. He fathered fourteen (14) children in all.
John opposed secession in Texas, according to his Pastor, J. H. Livsey. He believed a settlement could have been arbitrated without war had it been handled wisely. He was not a slaveholder.
When old John heard news of Jefferson Davis's death, he said, “If I can't outdo him any other way, I can outlive him.”
Jefferson Davis had been President of the Confederacy, which formed from the seceded states.
John Watson died in 1900. In his eulogy, Brother Livsey added, “In politics, Bro. Watson was a Republican, but there was something about the man that robbed the name 'Republican' of all its opprobrium.”
Mary Thompson was born into slavery in the early 1850s. She was old enough by the time liberation came to remember her status and to hope for better things.
Thompson married a freedman and settled into the sharecropping experience in Alabama's "Black Belt." She gave birth to ten children and, with her husband, played a central part in the Colored Methodist Church that emerged from the existing Methodist congregation in her community, dominated as it was by former slaveholders.
She never learned to read or write, but worked hard to support the tiny community school and its one teacher. Some of her children did learn to read and write, then drifted away to towns and cities in areas less haunted by brutal memories.
Mary remained behind, living fifty years as a widow after her husband died. The blessings of Liberty she hoped for as a newly freed young woman never quite materialized to her satisfaction. Nevertheless, she saw three generations born in the small measure of freedom they had gained. To her dying day, she never gave up hope for better things ahead.
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Bomfree in Ulster County, New York, in 1797. Ulster County remained predominantly Dutch-speaking at the time of her birth.
Forced into a breeder's marriage, Bomfree birthed five children between 1815 and 1826, the year she escaped with her infant daughter.
In 1827, New York became the first U. S. state to abolish slavery. This culminated a twenty-eight-year process that began under Governor John Jay in 1799. Bomfree successfully sued under the new law for the return of her 5-year-old son, who had been sold to slaveholders in Alabama.
In 1830, she moved with her family to New York City to work for a Christian minister. Swept up in the religious revivals of the day, she became a traveling evangelist.
While traveling, she met William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, leading abolitionists at the time. Both encouraged her to incorporate her own story of enslavement and escape into her speaking, which she did.
She legally changed her name to Sojourner Truth in 1843.
In 1851, she dictated her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, to Olive Gilbert. Thereafter, she supported herself by public speaking and book sales. Truth herself never learned to read or write.
At 6'0" tall, she was an imposing figure on a speaker's platform, at a time when significant audiences attended public speeches. She gave one such speech to a women's rights conference in Akron, Ohio. The speech, "Ain't I a Woman?" advocated for suffrage for Black women, as well as Liberty.
During the Civil War, she recruited young men into the Union Army and organized supplies for Black troops at the front. After the war, she worked with customary energy with the Freedmen's Bureau.
Sojourner Truth continued her public advocacy until old age rendered it impossible. She died in 1883 in Battle Creek, Michigan.
She watered the Liberty Tree with her own blood, sweat, and tears.
Abraham Lincoln joined the dance of Liberty in 1809, born in a log cabin in a remote area of Kentucky. Valid titles to land were hard to come by in Kentucky in those days. Disputes over land ownership led Lincoln's parents to relocate twice during his childhood: first to another site in Kentucky and then to southern Indiana.
Like many on what was then the western frontier, young Lincoln had little opportunity for formal education. Despite that, he learned to read and write and voraciously read whatever books he came across. His particular favorites included The Bible, A Pilgrim's Progress, Aesop's Fables, Robinson Crusoe, and Mason Weems' The Life of Washington. Young Lincoln spent so much time reading and scribbling notes that some of his neighbors mistook him for lazy.
In 1818, Lincoln's mother died. His father remarried, bringing his new wife and her three children to the Indiana farm. The second wife also died shortly thereafter, followed by Lincoln's older sister, who died during childbirth. In 1830, the Lincoln family relocated to southern Illinois. After helping to get them established on the new land, he set out on his own at age 21.
He read for and passed the bar in Illinois, becoming a lawyer. Lincoln's talents rapidly became evident. In 1837, he relocated to Springfield, Illinois, which had been chosen as the state's new capital. Lincoln married Mary Todd there in 1841.
As his legal career prospered, he became involved in politics as well, serving several terms in the Illinois Legislature and one in the U. S. House of Representatives. Lincoln was a member of the Whig Party when he entered public life. The Whigs opposed the expansion of slavery, an issue with which Lincoln vigorously agreed. When the Whig Party disintegrated in the 1840s and 1850s, Lincoln joined the Republican Party, founded in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854.
The Republicans were committed to “free labor” and determined to eventually abolish slavery, In the interim, they passionately opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories, and laws forcing residents of non-slave states to capture and return those who escaped enslavement.
After losing to Democrat Stephen Douglas in 1858 in a race for the U. S. Senate in Illinois, Lincoln was nominated for President by the Republicans in 1860. It was only the second presidential election the party had contested. He carried eighteen states and 60% of the electoral vote, though he only carried 40% of the popular vote in a particularly fractured political year. In many of the slave states, his name was not even on the ballot.
Before he was inaugurated, the country began breaking apart. Seven states initially seceded from the Union, forming the Confederacy on February 4, 1861. All cited the threat to slavery. An uneasy truce held until after the inauguration.
On the morning of April 12, 1861, just over a month after Lincoln's inauguration, southern forces opened fire on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Civil war erupted between the opposing sides. At this fraught moment, four more states seceded and joined the Confederacy.
Lincoln's initial determination was to preserve the Union. As the war dragged on, though, he saw the necessity of striking at the institution of slavery in order to break the economic power of the rebellion. After the Union victory at Antietam, Maryland, in 1862, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in states that had rebelled.
As the tide of war turned decisively against the rebellion, Lincoln lobbied for and Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution in January of 1865, abolishing slavery nationwide. Approved by the necessary number of state legislatures, excluding, of course, those in rebellion, the amendment became the law of the land in December of 1865.
By then, the war had ended in a Union victory. Lincoln did not live to see the emancipation, having been murdered in Washington by a Southern sympathizer on April 15, 1865.
He remains to this date perhaps the most influential advocate for Liberty in the history of the Americas.
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