Jeffrey L. Amestoy has served as Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and is a Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School.
Slavish Shore is the first new biography of Richard Henry Dana in
over fifty years, and rigorous attention to Dana is long overdue.
Amestoy is an excellent writer who takes us gracefully through
Dana’s fascinating life, providing much new insight into his
defense of fugitive slaves and his work on the treason case against
Jefferson Davis. It is an important story, very well told.
*Steven Lubet, author of Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers,
and Slavery on Trial*
Both a richly detailed biography of Richard Henry Dana and a
snapshot of American life at the end of the age of sail, Amestoy’s
Slavish Shore is the perfect companion volume for anyone who has
been captivated by Two Years Before the Mast. Amestoy’s book
follows Dana as he carries home the lessons he learned at sea and
shocks the hidebound world of upper-crust Boston by standing up for
the rights of seamen and fugitive slaves. But Slavish Shore also
gives us the story of a private man caught in the sometimes
suffocating atmosphere of family life, charting a haphazard course
between independence and duty, ambition and disappointment.
*Wes Davis, editor of An Anthology of Modern Irish
Poetry*
The strongest element of Amestoy’s treatment in Slavish Shore is
his dramatization of the intricacies and personalities of the
growing Abolitionist fervor of Boston in the years of Dana’s
flourishing…A fine new biography.
*Open Letters Monthly*
Excellently reveals how Dana wrested from the text of the U.S.
Constitution the acknowledgment that the African-American slave, a
kind of property as far as the traditional reading went, also had
rights.
*Wall Street Journal*
[Slavish Shore] is a meticulous, engaging, and informative study of
Dana’s life, which unequivocally defends its portrait of this
significant American man of letters as an equally significant man
of the law that will be of particular interest to both literary
scholars and historians concerned with the intersections of
maritime law, slavery, and aristocratic New England culture in the
turbulent decades leading up to the Civil War.
*American Literary History*
Slavish Shore, Jeffrey Amestoy’s superb new biography of Dana—the
first in more than 50 years—should make many more people familiar
with him…Slavish Shore presents an insightful portrait of Dana as a
man as well as a lawyer…An excellent book—never tedious and often
gripping—and Dana deserves our renewed attention.
*Federal Lawyer*
Amestoy’s biography is excellent: well written, comprehensive,
empathetic, and well researched…Amestoy is at his best, better than
any other biographer, when narrating Dana’s role in several of
America’s crucial cases in which human rights were at risk and a
moral compass was needed.
*New England Quarterly*
How appropriate that the year 2015, the bicentennial of Richard
Henry Dana Jr.’s birth, ushered in the publication of what will be
considered for quite some time the definitive biography of the
famed sailor, author, lawyer, and activist.
*Journal of the Early Republic*
How appropriate that the year 2015, the bicentennial of Richard
Henry Dana Jr.’s birth, ushered in the publication of what will be
considered for quite some time the definitive biography of the
famed sailor, author, lawyer, and activist.
*Journal of the Early Republic*
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