Edward Gorsuch (Bordewich, 2006)

Edward Gorsuch was also an angry man.  He had, by his lights, been kind to the four prime field hands who had run away from him on the night of November 6, 1849.  He had even promised them freedom when they reached the age o twenty-eight.  That was an economically sensible decision in the border country of Maryland, where slavery had been in decline for decades, and the steady hemorrhaging of slaves north in Pennsylvania made human livestock a poor long-term investment.  But it was also magnanimous, the sixty-three-year-old Gorsuch thought.  After all, he had every right to sell unwanted slaves southward, if he preferred.  But he was a Methodist, and a Sunday school teacher, and a man of principle.  He was also a deeply proud man, and by the spring of 1851 his failure to find the men--Noah Buley, Nelson Ford, and George and Joshua Hammond--embarrassed him in front of his fellow slave owners, and set a worrisome precedent of his seven remaining slaves.