Freedom's Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America

A fascinating study of freedom and slavery, told through the life of an escaped slave who built a life in the Hudson Valley

In 1793 James F. Brown was born a slave, and in 1868 he died a free man. At age 34 he ran away from his native Maryland to pass the remainder of his life as a gardener to a wealthy family in the Hudson Valley. Two years after his escape and manumission, he began a diary which he kept until his death. In Freedom’s Gardener, Myra B. Young Armstead uses the apparently smal...