Richard Smith
A Zoom Event
Date: Fri., Sept. 18
Time: 7 pm
Program Description:
170 years ago, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by President Millard Fillmore. Every American citizen was now expected to be a slave catcher, and no African American in the North could consider him or herself safe from the threat of being sent back to enslavement.
Abolitionists now stepped up to protest the new Law and to protect African-Americans from being captured and sent South. The heart of the Anti-Slavery movement was Boston, and the Abolitionists there were particularly radical in fighting the Fugitive Slave Law. Concord itself hsd its share of Radical abolitionists, and men and women with the names of Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott, along with many others, stood up to fight what they considered an immoral Law.
Join Concord Historian Richard Smith as he tells the story of Concord and the Fugitive Slave Law. The well known Concordians are part of the story, but some of their lesser known friends and neighbors, male and female, black and white, also took part in the resistance!
Richard Smith has lectured on and written about antebellum United States and 19th-century American literature since 1999. He has worked as a public historian in Concord, Massachusetts for 21 years, specializing in Henry David Thoreau, the Transcendentalists, the Anti-Slavery movement and the Civil War. He has written five books for Applewood Books.