Shadrach Minkins : from fugitive slave to citizen
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Bibliographic Information
Shadrach Minkins : from fugitive slave to citizen
Harvard University Press, 1998, c1997
- : pbk
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"First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1998"--T.p. vesro
Includes bibliographical notes (p. [229]-277) and index
Description based on: 3rd printing, 1998
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Prologue Norfolk "Han't Got No Self" "Horses and Men, Cattle and Women, Pigs and Children" "The Silver Trump of Freedom" Boston "Cradle of Liberty"? "A New Reign of Terror" "Much Excitement Prevails" "A Thing...or a Man?" "Plucked as a Brand from the Burning" "Never Was a Darker Day" North Star Montreal "Please to Remember Me Kindly" A Home Far Away "Free at Last! Free at Last!" Epilogue Militia Petition by Black Residents of Montreal Notes Acknowledgments Index Illustrations Hampton Roads, Virginia (Mariner's Museum, Newport News, Virginia) Market Square, Norfolk (author's collection) Newspaper advertisement of sale of Shadrach Minkins (Library of Congress) Daniel Webster (Massachusetts Historical Society) Boston's West End (Sixth Ward) neighborhood (Massachusetts Historical Society) The Joy Building, Boston (The Bostonian Society/Old State House) Lewis Hayden (Houghton Library, Harvard University) Joshua B. Smith (Massachusetts Historical Society) William and Ellen Craft (William Still, The Underground Railroad, 1872) The Boston Court House and Court Square (The Bostonian Society/Old State House) Route of Shadrach Minkins' rescue party (author's collection) Boston Daily Times article (Boston Athenaeum) Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (National Park Service, Longfellow National Historic Site) House of Francis E. and Ann Bigelow (Concord Free Public Library) Ann Bigelow in old age (Concord Free Public Library) View of Montreal (Collection: McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal) Notice of the Real Ethiopian Serenaders' benefit concert (National Archives of Canada, Ottawa) Detail of map of Montreal (Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, McLennan Library, McGill University) George E. Jones (Courtesy of Robert "Bud" Jones)
by "Nielsen BookData"