Fugitive Slave on Trial
Fugitive Slave on Trial

Author: Earl M. Maltz

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13:

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Chronicles the case of a runaway slave who was tracked to Boston by his owner. Compellingly details the struggle over his fate and how that became a focal point for national controversy. Reveals how the case became one of the most dramatic and widely publicized events in the long-running conflict over the issue of fugitive slaves.

The Trials of Anthony Burns
The Trials of Anthony Burns

Author: Albert J. Von Frank

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 9780674039544

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Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston--and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in abolitionist Boston just as the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect, it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation. In a searching cultural analysis, Albert J. von Frank draws us into the drama and the consequences of the case. He introduces the individuals who contended over the fate of the barely literate twenty-year-old runaway slave--figures as famous as Richard Henry Dana Jr., the defense attorney, as colorful as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Bronson Alcott, who led a mob against the courthouse where Burns was held, and as intriguing as Moncure Conway, the Virginia-born abolitionist who spied on Burns's master. The story is one of desperate acts, even murder--a special deputy slain at the courthouse door--but it is also steeped in ideas. Von Frank links the deeds and rhetoric surrounding the Burns case to New England Transcendentalism, principally that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His book is thus also a study of how ideas relate to social change, exemplified in the art and expression of Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Walt Whitman, and others. Situated at a politically critical moment--with the Whig party collapsing and the Republican arising, with provocations and ever hotter rhetoric intensifying regional tensions--the case of Anthony Burns appears here as the most important fugitive slave case in American history. A stirring work of intellectual and cultural history, this book shows how the Burns affair brought slavery home to the people of Boston and brought the nation that much closer to the Civil War.

More Than Freedom
More Than Freedom

Author: Stephen Kantrowitz

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-08-16

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1101575190

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A major new narrative account of the long struggle of Northern activists-both black and white, famous and obscure-to establish African Americans as free citizens, from abolitionism through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and its demise Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is generally understood as the moment African Americans became free, and Reconstruction as the ultimately unsuccessful effort to extend that victory by establishing equal citizenship. In More Than Freedom, award-winning historian Stephen Kantrowitz boldly redefines our understanding of this entire era by showing that the fight to abolish slavery was always part of a much broader campaign to establish full citizenship for African Americans and find a place to belong in a white republic. More Than Freedom chronicles this epic struggle through the lived experiences of black and white activists in and around Boston, including both famous reformers such as Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner and lesser-known but equally important figures like the journalist William Cooper Nell and the ex-slaves Lewis and Harriet Hayden. While these freedom fighters have traditionally been called abolitionists, their goals and achievements went far beyond emancipation. They mobilized long before they had white allies to rely on and remained militant long after the Civil War ended. These black freedmen called themselves "colored citizens" and fought to establish themselves in American public life, both by building their own networks and institutions and by fiercely, often violently, challenging proslavery and inegalitarian laws and prejudice. But as Kantrowitz explains, they also knew that until the white majority recognized them as equal participants in common projects they would remain a suspect class. Equal citizenship meant something far beyond freedom: not only full legal and political rights, but also acceptance, inclusion and respect across the color line. Even though these reformers ultimately failed to remake the nation in the way they hoped, their struggle catalyzed the arrival of Civil War and left the social and political landscape of the Union forever altered. Without their efforts, war and Reconstruction could hardly have begun. Bringing a bold new perspective to one of our nation's defining moments, More Than Freedom helps to explain the extent and the limits of the so-called freedom achieved in 1865 and the legacy that endures today.

Sanctuary
Sanctuary

Author: Nicole A. Waligora-Davis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-03-01

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0199708568

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In 2005, hurricane Katrina and its aftermath starkly revealed the continued racial polarization of America. Disproportionately impacted by the ravages of the storm, displaced black victims were often characterized by the media as "refugees." The characterization was wrong-headed, and yet deeply revealing. Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire traces the long history of this and related terms, like alien and foreign, a rhetorical shorthand that has shortchanged black America for over 250 years. In tracing the language and politics that have informed debates about African American citizenship, Sanctuary in effect illustrates the historical paradox of African American subjecthood: while frequently the target of legislation (slave law, the Black Codes, and Jim Crow), blacks seldom benefited from the actions of the state. Blackness helped to define social, cultural, and legal aspects of American citizenship in a manner that excluded black people themselves. They have been treated, rather, as foreigners in their home country. African American civil rights efforts worked to change this. Activists and intellectuals demanded equality, but they were often fighting for something even more fundamental: the recognition that blacks were in fact human beings. As citizenship forced acknowledgement of the humanity of African Americans, it thus became a gateway to both civil and human rights. Waligora-Davis shows how artists like Langston Hughes underscored the power of language to define political realities, how critics like W.E.B. Du Bois imagined democratic political strategies, and how they and other public figures have used their writing as a forum to challenge the bankruptcy of a social economy in which the value of human life is predicated on race and civil identity.