Meticulously researched — the footnotes take up about a sixth of the book, and are worth looking at ... Stolen is a remarkable narrative, in part, because of how Bell manages to clearly relate the complex politics of the time without ever legitimizing the choices made by those who bought and sold human lives. It's also wonderful for the ways in which Bell infuses each stage of the children's harrowing ordeal with empathy, focusing in on what they might have been feeling, drawing either from the precious little that remains of their own voices or from contemporary accounts of similarly traumatic kidnappings. In telling as full a story as he can, Bell gives voice to the broader implications of this episode while not losing sight of all that is specific and singular about Tilghman, Manlove, Johnson, Sinclair, and Scomp's experiences.
... extraordinary ... through painstaking archival research, Bell [has] reconstructed their lives with such vivid detail, sensitivity, and riveting storytelling that you would think each of their figures left us whole autobiographies. For the simple act of recovering their stories, [this] book would be commendable. But what makes [it] essential reading is the larger questions [it] demand of us as readers: What exactly was the condition under which un-enslaved black people lived before emancipation—and what is it that they and their descendants are owed? ... rich detail ... Where the archives run thin, Bell responsibly imagines what these two boys’ interior lives might have been like, and how they might have been kidnapped ... That the man who offered these boys some work was black might seem surprising. But the most compelling aspect of Stolen is how Bell handles these seeming oddities.
... gripping, often chilling ... Bell brings to life amoral con men, heartless slave dealers and suffering victims. He vividly re-creates the squalid social environments of interstate human trafficking. His superbly researched and engaging book exposes previously hidden horrors of American slavery.
Throughout, Bell stokes the suspense as we wonder how they will escape, especially once they trek farther south ... Bell acknowledges how attached he became to the boys during his research, a connection that shines through on the page. Still, he stresses the need to go beyond the human-interest angle to place their experience in the larger context of the slave trade — both illegal kidnapping and the perfectly legal, highly profitable enterprise that flourished throughout the South ... No images exist of the kidnappers or the kidnapped, but Bell makes effective use of period graphics and maps to depict their route. The book is an important addition to a lesser-known aspect of what slavery wrought in America. It is a compelling story, and you will root for these five boys.
Bell tells each boy’s story, including detailed accounts of their endurance in the face of unimaginable cruelty and iniquity, and recounts the exposure of those who were responsible ... An examination of the motivations of the white men who intervened as well as those of the kidnappers and slavers provides further insight into the political and economic forces at work. Rigorously researched, heartfelt, and dramatically concise, Bell’s investigation illuminates the role slavery played in the systemic inequalities that still confront Black Americans.
... moving ... Drawing from a wealth of archival materials, Bell paints a harrowing picture of this human trafficking network and the 'tens of thousands of free black people' it ensnared. The result is a scholarly work that tells a powerful human interest story.
Tapping rich archival sources, Bell overreaches only when he strains to portray criminals like the Johnson gang as a 'Reverse Underground Railroad,' drawing oversimplified parallels between people like Harriet Tubman, a 'conductor' on that storied network, and murderous thugs like Ebenezer, whom he casts as 'a conductor' on its evil twin. His book—more comprehensive than Solomon Northup’s memoir of his own kidnapping, Twelve Years a Slave—needed no such distracting comparisons to deserve wide attention. Ultimately, Bell offers a well-told story of brave, abducted boys—and the equally brave adults who fought for them—slightly undercut by its aggressive casting of Underground Railroad workers and kidnappers of free blacks as mirror images of one another.
