In 1860, Eliza Winston escaped enslavement while traveling in Minnesota, where she secured her freedom through legal appeal. Her story adds powerful testimony to African American experiences and perseverance in antebellum America. On August 22, 1860, an enslaved woman from Mississippi named Eliza Winston petitioned for her freedom before a judge in Minnesota— and she won . After she left the state for Canada, the abolitionists who had helped her told and retold the story, emphasizing their own actions; their detractors claimed they had used Winston as a pawn. For more than 150 years, historians' accounts have emphasized the mobs who battled in the streets after the ruling, focusing on the implications of the events for Minnesota politics rather than Winston's own story. With It Took Courage, Christopher P. Lehman helps set the record straight. Lehman uncovers the story of Winston's first forty-two years and her long struggle to obtain her freedom. She was sold away from her birth family; her husband, a free man, died before he could purchase her freedom. She labored in Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Minnesota. For thirty-one years she was enslaved by the family of President Andrew Jackson, who bought her for his great-niece and paid a cousin of James K. Polk to hold her in trust. Winston's victory produced a compelling irony: a woman Jackson himself had enslaved defeated a part of his legacy in Minnesota. The survival of the remarkable story of Eliza Winston's battle for individual freedom is an important contribution to the larger understanding of what slavery meant on this continent and how it affected individual lives—in both North and South. Winston's experience demonstrates the lengths to which a person would go to escape slavery, attempting to work both outside and inside the flawed and inequitable laws of the time, until finally receiving justice. If the traditional accounts relied on stereotypical depictions of Winston as "simple-minded," in Lehman's skillful description, Winston appears as a capable, mature woman who understood her life and her values. Eliza Winston herself made the bold decision to leave behind everything she had known for an uncertain but free future. Christopher P. Lehman is a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. He researches, writes, and teaches about the struggle for African American equality, using the tools of genealogy to trace the lives of people who have left very few traces. He has written six other books, including Slavery's Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State, which won the Minnesota Book Award for Minnesota Nonfiction in 2020. Eliza Winston, confined in the Winslow House hotel by her enslavers, Thomas and Mary Christmas, took her first opportunity to free herself when she was sent out to have a dress mended and met Emily Goodrich Grey, a free African American seamstress. This was a rare opportunity to meet with a local free African American without her enslavers, and she could not afford to assume that she would have another chance. She introduced herself to Grey as Eliza Winston. That introduction also resulted from her temporary separation from the Christmases. Most people identifying her during her enslavement associated her with whoever enslaved her, as when residents of Memphis referred to her as "Eliza Gholson." In contrast, Winston was the surname she chose for herself, and she divulged it to someone who understood the value of last names among African Americans. The enslaved woman then revealed another significant secret to the seamstress, confessing "that she wanted to be free and was held against her will." With those words she accused her enslaver of conducting criminal behavior, because the Christmases broke Minnesota law by enslaving her within its borders. The seamstress understood, based on Eliza's remarks, that her new acquaintance considered herself legally enslaved in the Northwest. At the very least, Grey knew that setting foot in a free state constituted freedom, because she had always been free in both Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Grey announced, "You are free now, if I could persuade you to think so." With that declaration, the seamstress simultaneously informed Eliza Winston of her legal status and tried to convince her to act upon it by at least acknowledging it.