Man in the Middle: Thomas Day and the Free Black Experience

Thomas Day (1801-ca. 1861) was a successful free black furniture maker and businessman who stood “in the middle” of competing forces in nineteenth-century America: between black and white, slave and free, North and South, and Africa and America. A black man who owned slaves and who also had abolitionist ties in the North, Day embodied the contradictions and complexity of his era, pre-Civil War America.
The accompanying EDSITEment lesson plan is here: edsitement.neh....
Brief biography: edsitement.neh....