Download or read book Shadrach Minkins written by Gary Collison and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-15 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of how an illiterate black man from Virginia found himself to be the catalyst of a dramatic episode of rebellion and legal wrangling before the Civil War.
Download or read book Shadrach Minkins written by Gary Collison and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On February 15, 1851, Shadrach Minkins was serving breakfast at a coffeehouse in Boston when history caught up with him. The first runaway to be arrested in New England under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, this illiterate Black man from Virginia found himself the catalyst of one of the most dramatic episodes of rebellion and legal wrangling before the Civil War. In a remarkable effort of historical sleuthing, Gary Collison has recovered the true story of Shadrach Minkins’ life and times and perilous flight. His book restores an extraordinary chapter to our collective history and at the same time offers a rare and engrossing picture of the life of an ordinary Black man in nineteenth-century North America. As Minkins’ journey from slavery to freedom unfolds, we see what day-to-day life was like for a slave in Norfolk, Virginia, for a fugitive in Boston, and for a free Black man in Montreal. Collison recreates the drama of Minkins’s arrest and his subsequent rescue by a band of Black Bostonians, who spirited the fugitive to freedom in Canada. He shows us Boston’s Black community, moved to panic and action by the Fugitive Slave Law, and the previously unknown community established in Montreal by Minkins and other refugee Blacks from the United States. And behind the scenes, orchestrating events from the disastrous Compromise of 1850 through the arrest of Minkins and the trial of his rescuers, is Daniel Webster, who through the exigencies of his dimming political career, took the role of villain. Webster is just one of the familiar figures in this tale of an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances. Others, such as Frederick Douglass, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (who made use of Minkins’s Montreal community in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), also appear throughout the narrative. Minkins’ intriguing story stands as a fascinating commentary on the nation’s troubled times—on urban slavery and Boston abolitionism, on the Underground Railroad, and on one of the federal government’s last desperate attempts to hold the Union together.
Download or read book The Price of Freedom written by Judith Bloom Fradin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When John Price took a chance at freedom by crossing the frozen Ohio river from Kentucky into Ohio one January night in 1856, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was fully enforced in every state of the union. But the townspeople of Oberlin, Ohio, believed there that all people deserved to be free, so Price started a new life in town-until a crew of slave-catchers arrived and apprehended him. When the residents of Oberlin heard of his capture, many of them banded together to demand his release in a dramatic showdown that risked their own freedom. Paired for the first time, highly acclaimed authors Dennis & Judith Fradin and Pura Belpré award-winning illustrator Eric Velasquez, provide readers with an inspiring tale of how one man's journey to freedom helped spark an abolitionist movement.
Download or read book Fugitive Justice written by Steven Lubet and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the tumultuous decade before the Civil War, no issue was more divisive than the pursuit and return of fugitive slaves—a practice enforced under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When free Blacks and their abolitionist allies intervened, prosecutions and trials inevitably followed. These cases involved high legal, political, and—most of all—human drama, with runaways desperate for freedom, their defenders seeking recourse to a “higher law” and normally fair-minded judges (even some opposed to slavery) considering the disposition of human beings as property. Fugitive Justice tells the stories of three of the most dramatic fugitive slave trials of the 1850s, bringing to vivid life the determination of the fugitives, the radical tactics of their rescuers, the brutal doggedness of the slavehunters, and the tortuous response of the federal courts. These cases underscore the crucial role that runaway slaves played in building the tensions that led to the Civil War, and they show us how “civil disobedience” developed as a legal defense. As they unfold we can also see how such trials—whether of rescuers or of the slaves themselves—helped build the northern anti-slavery movement, even as they pushed southern firebrands closer to secession. How could something so evil be treated so routinely by just men? The answer says much about how deeply the institution of slavery had penetrated American life even in free states. Fugitive Justice powerfully illuminates this painful episode in American history, and its role in the nation’s inexorable march to war.
Download or read book Resolve and Rescue written by Mark C. Bodanza and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where Frances Drake saw injustice, she tried to right it, and where freedom was denied, she fought to secure it. In Resolve and Rescue, author and historian Mark C. Bodanza explores the life of this Massachusetts woman who took up the cause of the slave early in the antislavery movement. He shows how, in an age dominated by men, Drake never allowed the disadvantages suffered by her gender to impede the great object of her work, the end of slavery in America. Resolve and Rescue narrates the story of this woman, born in 1814, who had an uncommon energy. She toiled for more than two decades to end slavery in ways great and small, including the promotion of some of the greatest speakers of the abolition movement. Her efforts were not limited to speeches or theory, but she publicly participated in the rescue of many fugitive slaves, including the first test case in New England under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; Bodanza also demonstrates that her fight wasnt limited to ending slavery, as she worked tirelessly for racial equality and womens rights. Resolve and Rescue shares the life story of Frances Drake, her conviction and courage displaying a timeless example of promoting justice and equality.
Download or read book The Interbellum Constitution written by Alison L. LaCroix and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-28 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A synthesis of legal, political, and social history to show how the post-founding generations were forced to rethink and substantially revise the U.S. constitutional vision Between 1815 and 1861, American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity. The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles, combined with a thoroughgoing commitment to investing those principles with meaning through debate. Each of these shared principles—commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity—concerned what we now call “federalism,” meaning that they pertain to the relationships among multiple levels of government with varying degrees of autonomy. Alison L. LaCroix argues, however, that there existed many more federalisms in the early nineteenth century than today’s constitutional debates admit. As LaCroix shows, this was a period of intense rethinking of the very basis of the U.S. national model—a problem debated everywhere, from newspapers and statehouses to local pubs and pulpits, ultimately leading both to civil war and to a new, more unified constitutional vision. This book is the first that synthesizes the legal, political, and social history of the early nineteenth century to show how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time.
Download or read book Douglass and Melville written by Robert K. Wallace and published by Spinner Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland; Herman Melville was born into prosperity in New York. Despite their divergent backgrounds, these contemporary American authors shared amazingly similar ideas about the most pressing issues of their day, including war, slavery, abolition, and race relations. They also lived and worked near each other during the peak of their careers. Did they meet? Author Robert K. Wallace raises that provacative question, seeking clues as he follows their parallel footsteps through New Bedford, New York City and Albany in this most unusal and fasicnating book! File it under "biography," or "American History" or "American literature" or "abolition" or just plain "good reading!"
Download or read book The War Before the War written by Andrew Delbanco and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The ... story of how fugitive slaves drove the nation to Civil War"--]cProvided by publisher.
Download or read book To Set This World Right written by Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decade before the Civil War, Concord, Massachusetts, was a center of abolitionist sentiment and activism. To Set this World Right is the first book to recover and examine the voices, events, and influence of the antebellum antislavery movement in Concord. In addressing fundamental questions about the origin and nature of radical abolitionism in this most American of towns, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis frames the antislavery ideology of Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson—two of Concord's most famous residents—as a product of family and community activism and presents the civic context in which their outspoken abolitionism evolved. In this historic locale, radical abolitionism crossed racial, class, and gender lines as a confederation of neighbors fomented a radical consciousness, and Petrulionis documents how the Thoreaus, Emersons, and Alcotts worked in tandem with others in their community, including a slaveowner's daughter and a former slave. Additionally, she examines the basis on which Henry Thoreau—who cherished nothing more than solitary tramps through his beloved woods and bogs—has achieved lasting fame as a militant abolitionist. This book marshals rich archival evidence of the diverse tactics exploited by a small coterie of committed activists, largely women, who provoked their famous neighbors to action. In Concord, the fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins was clothed and fed as he made his way to freedom. In Concord, the adolescent daughters of John Brown attended school and recovered from their emotional distress after their father's notorious public hanging. Although most residents of the town maintained a practiced detachment from the plight of the enslaved, women and men whose sole objective was the moral urgency of abolishing slavery at last prevailed on the philosophers of self-culture to accept the responsibility of their reputations.
Download or read book A Revolutionary Conscience written by Paul E. Teed and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theodore Parker was one of the most controversial theologians and social activists in pre-Civil War America. This book argues that Parker's radical vision and contemporary appeal stemmed from his abiding faith in the human conscience and in the principles of the American revolutionary tradition.
Download or read book Slavish Shore written by Jeffrey L. Amestoy and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-08 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1834 Harvard dropout Richard Henry Dana Jr. became a common seaman, and soon his Two Years Before the Mast became a classic. Literary acclaim did not erase the young lawyer’s memory of floggings he witnessed aboard ship or undermine his vow to combat injustice. Jeffrey Amestoy tells the story of Dana’s determination to keep that vow.
Download or read book Jim Crow North written by Richard Archer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-20 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Shadrach Howard, David Ruggles, Frederick Douglass, and others had rejected demands that they relinquish their seats on various New England railroads. They were protesting segregation on Jim Crow cars, a term that originated in New England in 1839. Theirs was part of a larger movement for equal rights in antebellum New England. Using sit-ins, boycotts, petition drives, and other initiatives, African-American New Englanders and their white allies attempted to desegregate schools, transportation, neighborhoods, churches, and cultural venues. Above all they sought to be respected and treated as equals in a reputedly democratic society. Jim Crow North is the tale of that struggle and the racism that prompted it. Despite widespread racism, black New Englanders were remarkably successful. By the advent of the Civil War African American men could vote and hold office in every New England state but Connecticut. Schools, except in the largest cities of Connecticut and Rhode Island, were integrated. Railroads, stagecoaches, hotels, and cultural venues (with occasional aberrations) were free from discrimination. People of African descent and of European descent could marry one another and live peaceably, even in Maine and Rhode Island where such marriages were legally prohibited. There was an emerging, if still small, black middle class who benefitted most. But there were limits to progress. A majority of African-Americans in New England were mired in poverty preventing full equality both then and now.
Download or read book Places of the Underground Railroad written by Tom Calarco and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-12-03 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This up-to-date compilation details the most significant stops along the Underground Railroad. Places of the Underground Railroad: A Geographical Guide presents an overview of the various sites that comprised this unique road to freedom, with entries chosen to represent all regions of the United States and Canada. Where most works on the Underground Railroad focus on the people involved, this unique guide explores the intricacies of travel that allowed the "conductors" to carry out the tasks entrusted to them. It presents an accurate picture of just where the Underground Railroad was and how it operated, including routes and itineraries and connections between the various Railroad locations. Through information about these locations, the book takes readers from the beginnings of organized aid to fugitive slaves during the period following the American Revolution up to the Civil War. It delineates the possible routes fugitive slaves may have taken by identifying the rivers, canals, and railroads that were sometimes used. And it shows that a network, though decentralized and variable over time and place, truly was established among Underground Railroad participants.
Download or read book The Captive s Quest for Freedom written by R. J. M. Blackett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the impact fugitive slaves had on the Fugitive Slave Law and the coming of the American Civil War.
Download or read book Slavery and the African American Story written by Patricia Williams Dockery and published by Crown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until now, you've only heard one side of the story: how slavery began, and how America split itself in two to end it. Here's the true story of America from the African American perspective. From the moment Africans were first brought to the shores of the United States, they had a hand in shaping the country. Their labor created a strong economy, built our halls of government, and defined American society in profound ways. And though the Emancipation Proclamation wasn't signed until 300 years after the first Africans arrived, the fight for freedom started the moment they set foot on American soil. This book contains the true narrative of the first 300 years of Africans in America: the struggles, the heroes, and the untold stories that are left out of textbooks. If you want to learn the truth about African American history in this country, start here.
Download or read book Migrants Against Slavery written by Philip J. Schwarz and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Virginians migrated north and west with the intent of extricating themselves from a slave society. All sought some kind of freedom: whites who left the Old Dominion to escape from slavery refused to live any longer as slave owners or as participants in a society grounded in bondage; fugitive slaves attempted to liberate themselves; free African Americans searched for greater opportunity. In Migrants against Slavery Philip J. Schwarz suggests that antislavery migrant Virginians, both the famous--such as fugitive Anthony Burns and abolitionist Edward Coles--and the lesser known, deserve closer scrutiny. Their migration and its aftermath, he argues, intensified the national controversy over human bondage, playing a larger role than previous historians have realized in shaping American identity and in Americans' effort to define the meaning of freedom.
Download or read book Restaurant Republic written by Kelly Erby and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the 1820s, the vast majority of Americans ate only at home. As the nation began to urbanize and industrialize, home and work became increasingly divided, resulting in new forms of commercial dining. In this fascinating book, Kelly Erby explores the evolution of such eating alternatives in Boston during the nineteenth century. Why Boston? Its more modest assortment of restaurants, its less impressive—but still significant—expansion in commerce and population, and its growing diversity made it more typical of the nation’s other urban centers than New York. Restaurants, clearly segmented along class, gender, race, ethnic, and other lines, helped Bostonians become more comfortable with deepening social stratification in their city and young republic even as the experience of eating out contributed to an emerging public consumer culture. Restaurant Republic sheds light on how commercial dining both reflected and helped shape growing fragmentation along lines of race, class, and gender—from the elite Tremont House, which served fashionable French cuisine, to such plebeian and ethnic venues as oyster saloons and Chinese chop suey houses. The epilogue takes us to the opening, in 1929 near Boston, of the nation’s first Howard Johnson’s and that restaurant’s establishment as a franchise in the next decade. The result is a compelling story that continues to shape America.
