Barbara Leigh Partridge

"Taken to a slave auction with his father in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1836, twelve-year-old John Wilder tensed as he heard a pregnant black teenage girl's pleas not to be separated from her son. While others in the crowd told John that black people were different from them, with different sensibilities, he knew that was not the case. Sensing his son's consternation and being a compassionate man himself, John's father purchased the entire family...