A book to read this fall according to The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer!
For fans of Master Slave Husband Wife and Django Unchained comes the extraordinary forgotten story of an event known in its day as the first shots of the Civil War, from the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mtters Marvels.
The year, 1851. The place, a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold, where a Maryland enslaver had journeyed in pursuit of four men whod fled his plantation years before. In a few hours, hed be deadand twenty-seven men from the village of Christiana would be rounded up and put on trial. Not for his murder, but for treasonfor waging war against the United States, at a time when it was a crime against the government to obstruct an enslaver looking to reclaim his property.
This is story of what happened in Christiana that September morningand in the ensuing trial of the century, which saw the president himself advise the prosecution on strategy and a sitting congressman serve as lead attorney for the defense. But The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is also a much larger tale, one spanning decades, following a whole startlingly diverse community of abolitionists in their fight to convince their fellow Americans of the subversive idea that now found itself on trial: that the nation ought to live up the ideals it was founded on, and respect all men as equals.
Its a story that whisks readers from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster Countywhere a self-emancipated man named William Parker, whom legend had it bullets could not kill, rallied his neighbors to ride out each night to battle the slavecatchers who stalked their countrysideto Philadelphias genteel Society Hill, where socialite Harriet Forten Purvis had the ear of the mayor (and a cellar filled with fugitives). Its stylish, propulsive, intimately human tale of bravery, ingenuity, and hopeand of ordinary people with little in common who came together to stand against injusticeand won.
