Joseph Halsted

Pursued to Freedom Joseph Halsted

1796 Fact based historical novel about the migration of enslaved people in the American south to the new free British colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Maame, a teenage girl, is awakened by a screaming hoard of savages. Dragged from her home she's chained with her neighbors; the young and elderly ruthlessly murdered before her eyes. Force marched to a slave pen; she awaits shipment in a stinking slave ship's hold to an auction across the sea. Caleb, field slave on a Maryland tobacco plantation, is nearly whipped to death for merely helping a sick woman. With two friends he barely escapes plantation bondage and slave hunters through the Underground Railway These escapees find themselves in New England as Jake Shaw, a ship owner, and his family spirit them to safety in Nova Scotia. They are sailed onward to Freetown in Sierra Leone, a free colony established by 'The Saints', an influential abolitionist group in London. Tom Black, an implacable bounty hunter, visualizing huge profits from the value of so many slavery escapees, is relentless. Enlisting slave ship captains and even the French Navy, he intends to sack the entire colony and resell its citizens back to bondage. Pursued to Freedom is an uplifting tale inspired by historical facts including the final battle between the largely undefended Freetown citizenry and the French Navy.