When Nance, a twelve-year-old girl of color, was beaten nearly to death by a brutal sheriff in 1835, she challenged both law and bigotry by suing for her freedom all the way to the Supreme Court of Illinois.  

Her affordable attorney was a young bumpkin who’d only been a lawyer for about a month.

His name was Abraham Lincoln.

Nance, even in chains, fearlessly confronted the state’s most powerful slave-holders, challenged hypocritical anti-slavery laws, and won, in some of the most important civil-rights lawsuits in American history.

But only a few documents of this girl’s heroic fight remain today, and even fewer about Lincoln’s first appearance before the high court-all buried and forgotten in the files of the courts of the State of Illinois.  

Their story has never been told. Until now.

In Nance:  A Girl of Color and Her Lawyer Abraham Lincoln, Kevin Orlin Johnson gives us the very best of narrative history, a tapestry woven of many colors — slavery, compassion, prejudice, comedy, corruption, vindication — and the very first appearance of Abraham Lincoln as a lawyer before the Supreme Court of Illinois, an episode strangely ignored by Lincoln Studies for a century and a half.  

Johnson links the documented events of their lives with carefully researched accounts of what must have happened to connect those people through the baffling tangle of laws that legalized slavery in Lincoln’s Illinois.  The result is an enlightening history lesson and an entertaining read, too.  

Johnson’s deep love and intimate understanding of the land he grew up in resurrects a cast of actual characters of every type, all forgotten or unfairly neglected, and displays their lives, compassionately and even affectionately, in cinematic detail across the whole scope and splendor of the American prairie — the world’s richest farmland, then swept by grass fires, vigilantes, land pirates, and Northern slave traders bent on kidnapping any lonely traveller, of any race, to be sold down the River.  Their true stories shatter stereotypes and expectations on every page.  

In particular, Nance resurrects a pivotal case that stands this heroic girl in her rightful place alongside other great champions of racial justice such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Rosa Parks and calls for a re-assessment of the world of Abraham Lincoln.  

Nance:  A Girl of Color is vivid, challenging, ground-breaking, a work of meticulous scholarship sparked with Johnson’s trademark wit, brightly visual and brightly funny, cinematic in its scope and detail.  If Nance were a movie, it’d be somewhere between Spielberg’s Lincoln and Madden’s Shakespeare in Love.  

Film, television, and some subsidiary and merchandising rights for Nance are still available.  Business inquiries: 

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