Jul 27, 2021

Isabella Beecher was outraged like many of her Boston neighbors by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law 1850. The new law, part of the Compromise of 1850, required citizens in free states to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves under penalty of stiff fines or imprisonment. Isabella was fully occupied looking after...

Jul 20, 2021

Among the many challenges to the statesmanship of the framers of the Constitution, none was more fundamental or intractable than the problem of slavery. On August 21 the Constitutional Convention, meeting in Independence Hall in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, officially took up a provision that forbade the Congress...

Jul 13, 2021

Jefferson drafted the Declaration, a committee reviewed it, corrections were made, and on July 2-4, Congress—in the midst of much other pressing business of fighting a war—edited it into the final form. They made important changes, including deletion of a passage denouncing the king of Great Britain for imposing the...

Jul 6, 2021

Slavery has been around since the beginning of human history. It was practiced among the native peoples of north America before and after Europeans arrived, and it was legal in every American colony in the years prior to the American Revolution. Then a great historic change began, a revolution in the hearts and minds of...