"In the mid-1870s, Daniel McCormack, a street urchin in New York's dangerous Five Points district, attracts the attention of a criminal gang with his astounding hand-eye co-ordination. Elsewhere, Lincoln Henry, a Tennessee-born child of ex-slaves, turns heads with his gift for geometry and mathematics, and Lily Mandeville, an orphan working with a traveling circus, discovers her talent for talking with dogs. Daniel's gang and Lily's circus travel...

Union occupation of parts of the Confederacy during the Civil War forced federal officials to confront questions about the social order that would replace slavery. This volume of Freedom presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in the large plantation areas of the Union-occupied Lower South. The documents illustrate the experiences of former slaves as military laborers, as residents of federally sponsored "contraband...