"A Struggle, and Not a Simple Heroic Legacy"

"The great payoff of the story occurs only as Nash (who knows old Philadelphia as well as the great English historian Richard Cobb knew Revolutionary Paris) finally traces the modern movement of the bell from a quiet out-of-the-way plaza near Benjamin Franklin’s house to its new resting place between Independence Hall and the National Constitution Center. Its new home at Sixth and Market Streets was not some miscellaneous urban lot: it adjoins the space where a house was successively inhabited by two prominent Philadelphia slave-owners, Mayor William Masters and William Penn’s grandson Richard, and then by British general Sir William Howe, and the American Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris. When the national government returned to Philadelphia late in 1790, Morris leased the house to President George Washington, so it became the executive mansion—and the place where he employed a significant contingent of indentured servants and slaves (some his own, others belonging to Martha), while worrying that the latter would take advantage of Pennsylvania’s law allowing freedom to slaves after six months’ residence.
"The site was thus intimately associated with the history of American slavery as well as American liberty—and with all the complexity and the moral discomfort that most historians (other than Lynne Cheney, who is now writing a biography of James Madison) believe is inevitable if our history is to be properly understood and rightly taught."

In The New Republic, Jack Rakove reviews Gary B. Nash's The Liberty Bell.