"This striking account . examines interrace relations in the antebellum South at the level of daily life, revealing a more complex, and tragic, picture of slavery than is typically depicted. Animatedly told and gracefully constructed, this is a vital and unflinching look at slavery's deepest existential horrors." - Publishers Weekly , Starred Review "In his mesmerizing new book, Melvin Ely takes us into the courtrooms of the antebellum South. There he unfolds in front of us the trials of small-time slave owners, their overseers, their neighbors, and the men and women they claimed as their property. The results are stunning, disturbing, and absolutely revelatory." -- Kevin Boyle , National Book Award-winning author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age "In this eloquent and humane book, Melvin Ely ventures into the tangled legal record of American slavery. Turning over pieces of evidence, in conversation with the reader, Ely finds meaning and coherence hidden in the fragments.

The unique book that emerges reveals an American South of tortured subtlety, of common humanity twisted by enslavement." -- Edward L. Ayers , author of The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America "With A Terrible Intimacy , Melvin Ely takes readers on a guided tour back and forth across the color line in the years before the Civil War. Out of the files of Virginia's courts spill stories of regret, resentment, compassion, gossip, envy, fear, affection, attachment, fury, betrayal, deceit. What results is an often-startling exploration of the difference that race made--and sometimes didn't." -- Christopher L. Brown , author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism "Opening a unique window into the historian's craft, Ely pieces together shards of evidence from court cases to reveal a variety of interracial interactions in the white supremacist, slaveholding South. Such variety, as these court records starkly dramatize, did not mitigate the disfiguring barbarity of slavery as a system that always depended on violence, and on the threat of violence.

" -- E lizabeth R. Varon , author of Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South "Here is an unusually penetrating look at human interactions in a slave society. By investigating six exceptionally well-documented cases, Melvin Ely exposes important truths often lost in more general books about American slavery. Everyone interested in the history of slavery will want to read this book." --Gregory May , author of A Madman's Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom.