The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker
The year, 1851. The place, a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold, where a Maryland enslaver had journeyed in pursuit of four men who'd fled his plantation years before. In a few hours, he'd be dead...and twenty-seven men from the village of Christiana would be rounded up and put on trial. Not for his murder, but for treason --for 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 morning--and 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. It's a story that whisks readers from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster County--where 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 countryside--to Philadelphia's genteel Society Hill, where socialite Harriet Forten Purvis had the ear of the mayor (and a cellar filled with fugitives). It's stylish, propulsive, intimately human tale of bravery, ingenuity, and hope--and of ordinary people with little in common who came together to stand against injustice...and won.