Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War (New Black Studies Series) - Softcover

Christianson, Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252076885 ISBN 13: 9780252076886

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2010

Synopsis

Freeing Charles recounts the life and epic rescue of captured fugitive slave Charles Nalle of Culpeper, Virginia, who was forcibly liberated by Harriet Tubman and others in Troy, New York, on April 27, 1860. Scott Christianson follows Nalle from his enslavement by the Hansborough family in Virginia through his escape by the Underground Railroad and his experiences in the North on the eve of the Civil War. This engaging narrative represents the first in-depth historical study of this crucial incident, one of the fiercest anti-slavery riots after Harpers Ferry. Christianson also presents a richly detailed look at slavery culture in antebellum Virginia and probes the deepest political and psychological aspects of this epic tale. His account underscores fundamental questions about racial inequality, the rule of law, civil disobedience, and violent resistance to slavery in the antebellum North and South.  As seen in New York Times and on C-Span’s Book TV.

About this title

About the Author:

Scott Christianson is the author of With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America and many other works. He lives in New York state.

From Booklist:

On the eve of the civil war, in 1860 in Troy, New York, a group of blacks and whites, including Harriet Tubman, struggled to free Charles Nalle from slave hunters sent to return him to bondage in Virginia. Nalle, a man of mixed race, so fair-skinned he could have passed for white but didn’t, had escaped slavery because he feared that his heavily indebted master planned to sell him. His wife and children, emancipated on their master’s death, had already moved to nearby Washington, D.C. Nalle had hoped to eventually reunite with his family in Canada. Christianson sets Nalle’s rescue in the broader context of slave escapes, the Underground Railroad, the abolition movement, and questions of civil disobedience. The Nalle incident occurred a few months after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and tested convictions of the black and white citizens of Troy in challenging the Fugitive Slave Law. Christianson explores the complications of the law, and he captures the drama of Nalle’s escape and attempted recapture and the complexities of citizens willing to defy the law for a higher principle. --Vanessa Bush

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0252076885
• ISBN 13: 9780252076886
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214