Snow-Storm in August

by MORLEY, JEFFERSON

• ISBN13: 9780385533379
• ISBN10: 0385533373
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-07-03
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Summary

The riveting story of how the epic struggle over slavery first violently erupted in the seat of American government. In 1835, the City of Washington was simmering. Drawn to the District of Columbia by the prospect of employment, newly freed African Americans from the South poured in, and free blacks outnumbered slaves for the first time. Meanwhile, white residents were forced to confront new ideas of what the nation's future might look like. On the night of August 4, 1835, Arthur Bowen, an eighteen-year-old slave, stumbled home intoxicated, found an ax left in the basement stairwell, and entered the bedroom where his owner, Anna Thornton, slept. Word of Arthur's drunken deed spread rapidly, and within days, Washington's first race riot exploded. Beverly Snow, a former slave turned successful restaurateur, personified the new aspirations for freedom and became the focus of the mob's ire, lending his name to newspaper coverage of the "Snow-Storm." In the wake of this uprising came two sensational criminal trials that gripped the city and a nation wracked by the issue of slavery. Prosecuting both cases was none other than Francis Scott Key, the famous lyricist of the national anthem, who few now remember served as the city's district attorney. Key aggressively defended slavery until the twilight's last gleaming, and he pandered to racial fears by seeking the maximum sentence for Bowen. But in a surprise twist his attempts were thwarted by Arthur's ostensible victim, Anna Thornton, a respected socialite whose deceased husband had designed the U.S. Capitol and who may well have been Arthur's father. After charming President Andrew Jackson into considering her unlikely appeal, Thornton secured an improbable victory for American justice by handing Key a resounding defeat. Snow-Storm in Augustis an absorbing account of the racial secrets and contradictions that once coursed beneath the capital of a rising world power.