WEBSITE vs BLOG?

As many of you know, I have a website, https;//www.greensblueandgray.com, along with this blog by the same name. I'm considering dropping the website and just keeping this blog going.

Why, you might ask? Well, it comes down to time and energy, it seems. The host of my website had all of its hosted sites re-format; I'm still in the process of re-doing my site. This happens to be my third website build with this host. It's a lot of work to re-do a site, the cutting and pasting, dropping images in place, moving margins, fixing fonts. You get the idea. I'm tired of doing it...again.

So, I am thinking of just going with this blog. I can put most everything I now have on the website right here in a series of posts. I know it won't be the same, but neither am I the same as I was years ago when I started the website. I'm running out of that special energy one must have to maintain a hopefully vibrant and new website. 

The same is true for maintaining a blog, perhaps as much of that energy. 

Hmmm.

I'm considering dropping the website and just keeping this blog going. I go back and forth with the pros and cons. Perhaps I need to work on getting some of that special energy... 

 AFGHANISTAN AFTER OUR WITHDRAWAL

Nation-building and pretense of knowledge about this world

 

By Alexander William Salter and Abigail R. Hall

 

“In establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest.” These are wise words from former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown Institutions protecting personal freedoms are necessarily the result of slow and steady development. The Anglosphere didn’t arrive at liberal-democratic capitalism overnight. As we watch the Afghan government collapse and the Taliban seize control, we’re seeing once again that nation-building didn’t work. It would never work. You cannot impose democracy from the top down.

 

Blame President Biden for the withdrawal fiasco, but not for the failure to transform the graveyard of empires into a modern state. The hubris of the last two decades has a deeper source. “Experts,” both civilian and military, thought they could export liberal democracy and free enterprise to a nation with no historical experience with the political and cultural mores necessary for these institutions to flourish.

 

Nation building is doomed to fail. To see why, consider one of the most important economists of the 20th century: F. A. Hayek. Although he won the Nobel Prize for his work on business cycles, he is most famous for his work on the “knowledge problem” as a critique of socialism.

 

Simply put, the knowledge required to coordinate an extensive division of labor cannot be harnessed by a single person or group of experts. Information is often tacit, defying quantification and communication. We need markets to channel this knowledge, creating a social intelligence that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Bureaucrats and politicians thinking they can out-plan businesses and households is nothing more than a “pretense of knowledge.”

 

Hayek’s later work on political and legal theory extended this insight to the institutions  supporting markets: property rights, the common law and constitutional democracy. These too cannot be designed or imposed in top-down fashion. They must grow organically. Thanks to Hayek, we know rationalism in politics is just as dangerous as in economics, if not more.

 

Nowhere is this more aptly portrayed than in the work of economist Christopher Coyne. His book “After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy” detailed the perils of attempting to build or otherwise reconstruct nation states. His work should be required reading for all serious students of international relations, as well as policymakers arrogant enough to think they can construct a country when they can’t even balance their own budget.

 

Coyne argues that successful reconstruction, as in the case of Afghanistan, requires “building, and in some cases building from scratch, both formal and informal institutions in order to achieve fundamental political, economic, and social change.” The citizens of the imposed upon nation must learn to live as comfortably within the new institutions as the old ones. But the required social and political knowhow can’t be transferred. The result is permanent friction between governors and governed.

 

To complicate matters, an intervening government simply cannot know all the information necessary to plan and implement radical institutional shifts from the top down. The network of political and legal rules that constitute successful countries are more like an ecosystem than an engineering problem. Nation-building is just as much a fatal conceit as central planning.

 

So what are we to do when confronted with oppressive regimes and immense human suffering?

 

There are no panaceas, but it’s far better to live up to our ideals than forcing those ideals on others. First, focus on free trade. When goods cross borders, so do ideas. It is when ideas are adopted that policies, and regimes, change. Second, look at immigration. If we truly want to alleviate human misery, allow those who want to live under liberal democratic principles the chance to do so. For Afghanistan, that means getting as many refugees here as want to come. [Not sure I agree with this idea. What if 30 million Afghanis want to come to the U.S.?]

 

Ought implies can. If nation-building is impossible, it’s absurd for us to try. Our fool’s errand in Afghanistan cost nearly a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. Long ago, President John Quincy Adams warned against the temptation for America to venture abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” We ignored his wisdom, with tragic results. What we need first and foremost is to embrace humility in foreign policy. We are not the world’s savior or guardian. Pretending otherwise will create nothing but misery.

 

Alexander William Salter is an economics professor in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University and a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute. Abigail R .Hall is an associate professor of economics at Bellarmine University. She is the coauthor of “Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism.”

 

Article from San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 29 August 2021.

 

 

 

In this image provided by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Air Force loadmasters and pilots assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, load people being evacuated from Afghanistan onto a U.S. Air Force C-17Globemaster III at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan on Aug. 24, 2021.

MASTER SGT. DONALD R. ALLEN — U.S. AIR FORCE VIA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

Agitators of the Peace

A Civil War Book Review

Frances Seward, Harriet Tubman and Martha Wright

KENT BARTON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the turbulent decades leading up to the Civil War, it could be said that the moral center of the nation rested in the Finger Lakes region of central New York state. The district was a hot spot of abolitionism and the fledgling women-rights movement.

Rochester, on the region’s western edge, was home to Frederick Douglass, ex-slave and celebrated orator, who published his abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, in a church basement. The village of Seneca Falls, on Cayuga Lake, was the site of the first women’s rights convention, in 1848, with its seminal Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. A medical school on Seneca Lake was the first to award a degree to a woman, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.

Our celebration of seasonal books on topics like nature, gardening, food and baseball—plus David Hockney in France, Richard Thompson’s musical memoir, ‘The Agitators’ and more.

Then there is Auburn, which sits at the northern tip of Owasco Lake. The town is at the heart of Dorothy Wickenden’s “The Agitators,” an absorbing and richly rewarding chronicle of three principled women who fought on behalf of abolitionism and women’s rights. The title comes from Lucretia Mott, a prominent feminist, abolitionist and Quaker who proudly modeled herself on the early Friends—social activists whom she once described as “agitators, disturbers of the peace.” Ms. Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker, traces the Auburn women’s lives with intelligence, compassion and verve. In an earlier book, “Nothing Daunted,” she told the story of two Auburn girls who left home to become teachers in the wilds of Colorado in 1916.

The most famous member of the Auburn trio is Harriet Tubman, whose life story is well-known. Born into slavery in Maryland, she escaped to Philadelphia in 1849, when she was in her 20s, only to return to her home state as a conductor on the Underground Railroad that carried escaped slaves to freedom. During the Civil War, she worked as a scout, spy and nurse for the Union Army. 

Auburn was one of Tubman’s stops on the Underground Railroad. Close to Lake Ontario, it was a jumping-off point for Canada, where fugitive slaves could be assured of safety. In Auburn, Tubman was introduced to Martha Coffin Wright and Frances Miller Seward, who opened their homes to the freedom seekers she sent their way. Giving a meal and a bed to a runaway slave was an act of courage in an era when the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 imposed harsh penalties on those who helped escapees. On the night that the first fugitive arrived in the Wrights’ kitchen, Martha felt “a sense of satisfaction unlike any she’d ever experienced,” Ms. Wickenden writes. “She was violating a law she could not tolerate, transforming her kitchen—the symbolic heart of woman’s sphere . . . —into a place of political asylum.”

Martha Wright, a mother of seven, was the younger sister of Lucretia Mott and a compatriot of feminist leaders Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She went on to become a founder of the Seneca Falls Convention, a supporter of property rights for married women, and an advocate of women’s suffrage.

The third member of this circle of friends, Frances Seward, was, in Ms. Wickenden’s words, a “quieter rebel.” The most conventional of the three, she belonged to a well-off family and had been educated at Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, the country’s best school for girls, at a time when no college accepted women. On a visit to Virginia in 1835, when she was 30, she was radicalized by the sight of 10 weeping black boys, ages 6 to 12, naked, roped together and overseen by a white man with a whip. The children were on their way to auction, where they would be sold to work in the fields of the Deep South.

As the wife of William Henry Seward, governor of New York, then senator and Lincoln’s secretary of state, Frances often found herself in the painful position of trying to follow her conscience without damaging the career of her husband, who was not as outspoken on the contentious issue of abolition. In keeping with his wishes, she kept a low public profile about her antislavery work, declining to sign an antislavery petition or publicize her work educating freed slaves. In private, however, she was a powerful and insistent adviser to her husband, pushing him to press Lincoln to emancipate the slaves.

In telling the stories of Martha Wright and Frances Seward, Ms. Wickenden relies heavily on their letters and diaries and those of close family members. The result is an intimate, detailed portrait of the women, including the effect that their activism had on their families. When we meet Martha in the 1820s, she is dissatisfied with her life as a homemaker and its endless drudgery. She writes: “The only way is to grub & work & sweep & dust, & wash & dress children, & make gingerbread, and patch & darn.” Frances, for her part, loathed being a political wife, choosing to spend long periods in Auburn rather than joining her husband in Albany or Washington. After 35 years of marriage, she informed Henry, by then a senator, that she would no longer act as his hostess. For both women, their work on the Underground Railroad sparked political awakenings and a resolve to take leadership roles in the causes they championed.

Harriet Tubman, who was illiterate and left no written record, is nevertheless the one who comes most alive in the book’s pages. Drawing on published interviews with Tubman and letters and diaries of people who knew her, Ms. Wickenden paints her as highly intelligent, determined and dignified—“a small, unstoppable woman . . . unafraid of the slave power of the South and the lawmakers in Washington.” When Tubman needed a home for the family members she had rescued and a base for her work, Frances Seward sold her a house in Auburn.

One of the pleasures of “The Agitators” is the cast of supporting characters who pass through its pages. John Brown “had a hypnotic effect on abolitionists who lacked his fire-breathing pugnacity.” Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas, one of Lincoln’s opponents in the 1860 election, was “a small, pot-bellied man with hooded eyes and big ambitions who had an ability to crash through legislative logjams.” Susan B. Anthony was “neither graceful nor beautiful nor rich nor winning to strangers” in the assessment of Martha’s daughter Ellen. Frances Seward describes Lincoln as “amusing and friendly, with a manner like an unassuming farmer’s—not awkward & ungainly but equally removed from polish of manner.”

As the story moves into the war years, the book’s focus shifts and Martha and Frances fade somewhat into the background. Tubman’s wartime service in South Carolina is chronicled in an electrifying chapter about a military raid on plantations along the Combahee River in which she leads 750 slaves to safety. A chapter on Martha’s son Willy, wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg, is deeply moving. Ms. Wickenden’s fast-paced description of the attack on Henry Seward by an associate of John Wilkes Booth on the night of Lincoln’s assassination is—in a word—thrilling. A Seward daughter who witnessed the attack writes in her journal: “Blood, blood, my thoughts seemed drenched in it—I seemed to breathe its sickening odor.”

Violence is an ever-present feature of “The Agitators”—from slavery’s brutalities to the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War. Auburn, where not everyone approved of the women’s work, was not immune. “These are lawless times,” Frances tells one of her sons after someone throws a rock through a window of the Seward home. That incident came on the heels of an assault on a black boy she was tutoring and after the family dog had been poisoned.

So, too, religion is a continuous presence. Martha, Frances, Harriet—Quaker, Episcopalian, Methodist—all believed that God was on the side of the abolitionists. Tubman went so far as to say that God wouldn’t let Lincoln win the war until he had freed the slaves. The women’s religious faith bolstered their moral determination and shaped their work.

In the book’s closing pages there is an astonishing photograph of Tubman, probably taken outside her home in Auburn in 1911, two years before her death at around the age of 90. It shows a diminutive figure dressed in suffragette white. After the war, the woman who had led slaves to freedom and shown wartime valor turned her attention to advancing the roles of women, black and white.

“The Agitators” carries no political message, but Ms. Wickenden’s assessment of the era leading up to the Civil War will resonate with readers in our own fractious age: “The nation never had been so politically engaged—or so divided.”

—Ms. Kirkpatrick is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of the forthcoming “Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman.”

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the April 10, 2021, print edition as 'Disturbers of the Peace.'

 

 

 Speaking again of John Brown:

Abolitionist’s gravestone returning

By Annakai Geshlider

ageshlider@scng.com

 

After years of preservation efforts by the Altadena community, a gravestone honoring abolitionist and former Altadena resident Owen Brown will soon be reinstalled at his gravesite in the foothills north of town.

“We’re really glad it’s finally happening,” said Michele Zack, a local historian and chair of the Owen Brown Gravesite Restoration Committee, which was created by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Owen Brown was the son of John Brown, the abolitionist who led the pre-Civil War raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. According to local historian Paul Ayers, Owen Brown stayed across the Potomac River during the raid, taking care of horses in preparation for a planned getaway and slave rebellion.

Instead, the raid failed and John Brown was hanged for his anti-slavery attempts, prompting his son to flee to Ohio. He lived as a fugitive for 20 years following the raid and eventually followed two siblings to California. In 1881, he settled into a cabin with his brother, Jason Brown, in

                                    

A plaque of Owen Brown is on display at Altadena Triangle Park in Altadena on Nov. 11, 2017. Brown’s gravestone is being returned to his gravesite in the foothills north of the city. ED CRISOSTOMO STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

 

Altadena Meadows, in the foothills north of town.

According to Ayers, the Brown brothers’ participation in the fight against slavery made them well-received when they arrived in Pasadena, where they paraded up and down Colorado Boulevard singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the top of their lungs. Those who founded Pasadena in 1874 had fought for the Union to abolish slavery, making the new city a safe place for the Browns to take refuge.

In the years following Owen Brown’s death in 1889, hundreds of White and Black locals came to pay homage at his gravesite, Ayers said. Interest faded as the 20th century wore on, especially as the Ku Klux Klan dominated Pasadena in the 1920s, and it “became a very racist town,” Ayers said.

The road to preserving Brown’s gravesite has been rocky.

Brown is buried on a 6-acre piece of land at the top of Rising Hill Road, near the base of the foothills. The area, known as “Little Roundtop,” sits not far from the cabin where Brown once lived. In the 1980s, preservation group Altadena Heritage unsuccessfully attempted to get historical status for the site. Because the land is private, preservation efforts have required negotiations with various owners over the years. One owner attempted to bar public access to the gravesite with a “No Trespassing” sign, resulting in a a 2006 ruling affirming the public has legal access to the site.

To top things off, the grave marker kept going missing. In 2002, the landowner at the time rolled the marker down the hill, and it disappeared from public view for 10 years, Ayers said. In 2012, locals rejoiced when Altadena resident Ian White — son of artist Charles White — discovered the grave marker while on a walk near his home.

For years, the area near the gravesite was caught in bitter debate. Developer Tim Cantwell planned to build 18 single-family units at the nearby gated community of La Vina, causing locals to protest the proposed development. Meanwhile, people were still fighting to preserve Brown’s grave for public access.

In 2019, an agreement was reached: The La Vina project will be completed with Cantwell agreeing to buy the land containing the gravesite to preserve it for the public. Cantwell also agreed to fund programs educating locals about Brown and Pasadena’s antislavery history.

Zack anticipates the gravestone will be installed soon, perhaps in the next couple months. With Cantwell having promised to fund the installation and a contractor hired, everything is ready to go. The only thing the committee is waiting is funding from the developer, Zack said.

The Owen Brown Gravesite Restoration Committee has been hosting public meetings since March. Zack said the committee is looking forward to the installation of the stone, marking the culmination of a long process.

“It’s a big deal,” Ayers said, especially because California doesn’t have many historical representations of abolitionism. A major goal of the gravesite restoration project will be educating the public about California’s importance in the Civil War, Zack said.

The state was “the key jewel that the Confederacy wanted” in its attempt to expand slavery, and Pasadena was a stronghold of anti-slavery sentiment, she added.

The gravesite restoration committee has four main tasks, Zack said: restore the gravesite, get the site designated as a historical monument, put the site and the surrounding property in a conservancy (giving it an added level of protection) and educate the public on the site’s significance.

In addition to educational programs for local youth and the public, Zack said the committee is hoping to work with filmmaker Pablo Miralles to create a documentary about the Brown family’s presence in California. In 2019, preservationists worked with Miralles to create a short film about the gravesite.

John Brown “believed firmly that slavery was an abomination, an evil of this country,” Ayers said. “And I think that’s a thing people have to embrace now, that racism is the original sin of the United States and that we have to confront it.”

                                    

Owen Brown, who was born Nov. 4, 1824, in Hudson, Ohio, was John Brown’s third son, and his stalwart lieutenant in Kansas and at Harper’s Ferry during the Civil War.

Article source: San Gabriel Valley Tribune 071121

 

                   My Great Great Grandfather and Grandmother were part of the Underground Railroad                        movement in Iowa up to the US Civil War. Here is a newspaper article from 1872 describing a                                            couple UGRR instances during those trying times:

Nathan and Elizabeth (Winder) Newlon

And the Underground Railroad[*]

 

Transcribed and Reformatted From the Original News Article

by

©2015 Chris Newlon Green

 

Iowa State Register[†]                                        December 15, 1872

 

Winterset Branch

      Something like a year ago the Winterset people celebrated the opening of the Rock Island Branch Road, but years before there was a road running through their town. Night expresses only were used, but they never ran off the track. At Winterset Mr. Nathan Newlon was the presiding genius. His crib has held frequent loads that were never gathered in a field of Yellow Dent nor Flint corn. But he was not alone in the business. The number of stockholders in the Underground Railroad at Winterset were legion. In the country there were Uncle Billy Ruby and David Martin, while Mr. J.J. Hutchings, Judge Pitzer, and a score of others in the village always responded when called on to pay for a darkey’s ticket on this famous line.

 

      Four miles east of St. Charles Mr. Wm. Beard kept a station. There was only one other Abolition family near him; the other neighbors all being pro-slavery Democrats of the strictest sect, and the sharpest lookout was necessary when a train was approaching or departing to prevent running into a Locofoco.[‡] Further on, near Indianola, Uncle Grimshaw, a staunch old Quaker with a heart as capacious as the big loft where he used to hide his sable guests, was station agent. The time table was arranged for trains to reach his house about daylight. Here the passengers laid over for the night express, which would roll out about ten o’clock, halting at the Quaker settlement between Knoxville and Indianola. The next stage was a long one – to Newton or to Taylor Peirce’s, and from there the time table has not been furnished us.

 

      One time a party of five slaves came through the northern part of Madison County on foot, and without a guide. They fell in the hands of some pro-slavery residents of the county, and were captured. That night they were placed in a covered wagon, to which four strong horses were attached, and started under guard to Missouri. But meantime some of the Madison County Abolitionists had heard of the circumstance and started in pursuit. About daylight they overhauled the wagon, rode in front of it, and seizing the horses, ordered a halt. The driver got out his shotgun and threatened to shoot. For fear that he might do so foolish a thing, one of the hard-hearted Abolitionists punch him behind the ear, and he retired from the discussion. By the time he again began to take an interest in this world’s affairs, the blacks and their liberators had disappeared, nor was there any further track of them visibly.

 

      The last train that passed through on the route came from Ray County, Missouri, starting just after the war commenced. They came through Page County, stopped over a day at Quincy and the next day halted at Mr. Samuel Ainsworth’s at Nevin. That night they started for the Winterset station. The mud was knee deep, but in the gray of morning Hon. B.F. Roberts came riding up to Mr. Newlon’s door with the announcement that Ainsworth with six fugitives, was close behind. There was a lively rattle of pots and pans in the farmer’s house, a clearing away of rubbish in the loft, and by the time the train arrived Mother Newlon had a smoking hot breakfast on the table and the quarters for the passengers were all prepared. That night they rested, and at nightfall Mr. Newlon started with them for Indianola.

 

      After daylight the next morning, by a circuitous route, they reached Uncle Grimshaw”s and from there they were sent to Newton. That was the last train, and a few weeks later the blacks began to pass through Iowa without a guide, and none molested them. The rails on the track were taken up, and the conductors handed in the records of their doings. They have been scrutinized by the nation, and pronounced correct; nor is it likely that, when the final accounts of men are entered on the ledger of immortality, there will be any balance on this score against those whose humane sympathy, Christian sentiments and brave hearts, made them active workers on the Underground Railroad.

 

---

[*] Nathan, 1812-1878; Elizabeth, 1806-1891

[†] In 1855 the Iowa Citizen began publishing and was renamed the Iowa State Register in 1860. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Des_Moines_Register

[‡] The Locofocos were a faction of the Democratic Party that existed from 1835 until the mid-1840s. The faction was originally named the Equal Rights Party, and was created in New York City as a protest against that city’s regular Democratic organization (“Tammany Hall”). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locofocos

 

While on the subject of John Brown, it's interesting to note that his widow, Mary, is buried in the Madronia Cemetery on Oak St. in Saratoga, CA. A couple years ago while visiting friends up there, I took this photo.

I'm going to continue the subject of Abolitionists for the next couple Posts.

 

From the Wall Street Journal On-line  1 May 2021:

Five Best: Novels on Slavery and the Civil War

Selected by Dorothy Wickenden, the author, most recently, of ‘The Agitators.’

 

                        Thomas Hovenden’s ‘The Last Moments of John Brown’ (ca. 1884).

                                           PHOTO: VCG WILSON/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

 

By Dorothy Wickenden, April 30, 2021

The Good Lord Bird

By James McBride (2013)

1. James McBride’s John Brown is a Bible-thumping, “low-down son of a bitch,” a murderous zealot who looks “mad as a wood hammer” and whose infamous militia consists of a dozen of the “bummiest, saddest-looking individuals you ever saw.” These are the early observations of the narrator, Henry Shackleford, an enslaved boy whom Brown mistakes for a girl and sweeps up in the wars of Bleeding Kansas. Henry “weren’t for no fighting,” but he accompanies Brown across the U.S. and into Canada as Brown flees the authorities and attempts to raise money and men. In this antic tale of the misadventures of the man who made the Civil War inevitable, Henry creates a portrait of Brown that grows fonder as the end approaches: “Pure to the truth, which will drive any man off his rocker. But at least he knowed he was crazy.” Henry witnesses Brown’s atrocities but also his tenderness and his puzzling commitment to fight “on behalf of the colored.” Noting Brown’s beatific smile before he is hanged, Henry says: “It was like looking at the face of God.”

Henry and Clara

By Thomas Mallon (1994)

2. “Henry and Clara” established Thomas Mallon as a master of historical fiction. Clara Rathbone—vain, clever and socially ambitious—reflects, near the climax of this blood-drenched novel, that she always sensed “there was a secret sewn into the violence of that night.” She is referring to April 14, 1865, when she and her fiancé, Maj. Henry Rathbone, last-minute guests of the Lincolns in their box at Ford’s Theatre, witness the assassination of the president. That much is true. But Mr. Mallon seamlessly blends fact and fiction in this sharply angled historic tableau. Clara’s “blind love” for her Byronic stepbrother can only end tragically, and through Clara Mr. Mallon also conveys just how unprepared the North is for the cataclysm of the war. In the spring of 1861, when Clara learns that her father, U.S. Senator Ira Harris, will allow her semi-incestuous marriage as soon as the Union declares victory, she exclaims, “I’m so happy! Maybe this war is a blessing—God forgive me for saying it.” Mr. Mallon, a stylish, witty writer, almost imperceptibly transforms his love story into a heart-stopping psychological thriller.

The Underground Railroad

By Colson Whitehead (2016)

 3. “The lesson was unclear,” Cora tells herself. No longer enslaved on the Georgia cotton plantation where she was raised, she finds that “misfortune had merely bided time: There was no escape.” Relentlessly pursued by the Javert-like slave-catcher Ridgeway, she becomes accustomed to the sound of the lock on his wagon: “It hitched for a moment before falling into place.” Ridgeway opines about “the American imperative”: “To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. If not subjugate, exterminate.” In Colson Whitehead’s dazzlingly inventive narrative, the Underground Railroad is an actual rail line that takes Cora through four hellish states—from an ostensible “new era” in South Carolina, where sterilization and scientific experiments are performed on free blacks, to temporary respite on a black farm in free-state Indiana. Like Cora, the reader cannot escape the hideous legacies of slavery, but Mr. Whitehead holds out some hope for a redemptive future through his heroine: discerning, fierce, indomitable.

The Killer Angels

By Michael Shaara (1974)

4. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a 34-year-old professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, thinks of Aristotle after he leads his bayonet charge on Little Round Top: In the presence of real tragedy, he concludes, “you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended.” Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Killer Angels” doesn’t so much re-create the three-day Battle of Gettysburg as inhabit it. Drawing on primary documents, Shaara climbs inside the minds of the warring officers and invites the reader to experience the sights, sounds and smells of the killing fields. White-haired Gen. Robert E. Lee’s bad heart leaves him with “a sense of enormous unnatural fragility, like hollow glass.” The Yankees hold the superior position in the hills outside town, but Lee disastrously refuses to consider the defensive maneuver urged on him by his second-in-command, James Longstreet. After the defeat, he concedes, “It is all my fault, it is all my fault.” As dusk falls, Chamberlain sits alone on the rocky hill, his mind “blasted and clean,” watching men moving below him with yellow lights, “from black lump to black lump while papers fluttered and blew and fragments of cloth and cartridge and canteen tumbled and floated against the gray and steaming ground. . . . It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.”

Washington Black

By Esi Edugyan (2018)

5. This wondrous adventure story, punctuated by scenes of gruesome violence, begins in 1830. Young George Washington Black, a field hand on a Barbados sugar plantation who is about to lose his life for a murder he did not commit, is whisked away in a hot-air balloon. Its inventor, Christopher, the abolitionist brother of the malign owner of the plantation, is an eccentric naturalist and explorer who has been tutoring “Wash.” In Virginia, Wash refuses to join two fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, preferring to accompany Christopher to the Arctic, on an apparently crazed search for Christopher’s father. Wash later makes his way to Halifax Harbor, where he becomes an expert in marine life. In Esi Edugyan’s crystalline prose, Wash observes the bloom of jellyfish in a nighttime sea: “fragile as a woman’s stocking, their bodies all afire.” But he is not all sensitivity and introspection. Attacked one night by a mercenary, Wash stabs him in the eye with an ivory-handled kitchen knife, then takes flight on his own quest, to find Christopher, the man with whom “freedom seemed a thing I might live in, like a coat”—only to discover that what he actually seeks is to shed the fear of “accepting my own power.”