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A gripping narrative history of the explosive events that drew together Francis Scott Key, Andrew Jackson, and an 18-year-old slave on trial for attempted murder.
In 1835, the city of Washington pulsed with change. As newly freed African Americans from the South poured in, free blacks outnumbered slaves for the first time. Radical notions of abolishing slavery circulated on the city's streets, and white residents were forced to confront new ideas of what the nation's future might look like.
On the night of August 4th, Arthur Bowen, an eighteen-year-old slave, stumbled into the bedroom where his owner, Anna Thornton, slept. He had an ax in the crook of his arm. An alarm was raised, and he ran away. Word of the incident spread rapidly, and within days, Washington's first race riot exploded, as whites fearing a slave rebellion attacked the property of the free blacks. Residents dubbed the event the “Snow-Storm," in reference to the central role of Beverly Snow, a flamboyant former slave turned successful restaurateur, who became the target of the mob's rage.
In the wake of the riot came two sensational criminal trials that gripped the city. Prosecuting both cases was none other than Francis Scott Key, a politically ambitious attorney famous for writing the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” who few now remember served as the city's district attorney for eight years. Key defended slavery until the twilight's last gleaming, and pandered to racial fears by seeking capital punishment for Arthur Bowen. But in a surprise twist his prosecution was thwarted by Arthur's ostensible victim, Anna Thornton, a respected socialite who sought the help of President Andrew Jackson.
Ranging beyond the familiar confines of the White House and the Capitol, Snow-Storm in August delivers readers into an unknown chapter of American history with a textured and absorbing account of the racial secrets and contradictions that coursed beneath the freewheeling capital of a rising world power.
"Snow-Storm in August is the sort of book I most love to read: history so fresh it feels alive, yet introducing me to a time and place that I had little known or utterly misunderstood. After reading Jefferson Morley's vibrant account, one can never hear 'The Star-Spangled Banner' the same way again."
—David Maraniss, author of Barack Obama: The Story
- Sales Rank: #388369 in Books
- Published on: 2012-07-03
- Released on: 2012-07-03
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.61" h x 1.39" w x 6.55" l, 1.56 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
Review
"Snow-Storm in August is the sort of book I most love to read: history so fresh it feels alive, yet introducing me to a time and place that I had little known or utterly misunderstood. After reading Jefferson Morley's vibrant account, one can never hear 'The Star-Spangled Banner' the same way again."
—David Maraniss, author of Barack Obama: The Story
"[Morley’s] plunge beneath the surface of history exposes realities more true to daily experience than executive proclamations or speeches in Congress. The book’s central motif is race, and the theme reverberates through a range of fascinating vignettes ... As an exploration of America’s capital city at a time when the fault line over slavery had become impossible to ignore, Snow-Storm in August deepens our appreciation of how slavery made a mockery of the founding and made the Civil War as close to inevitable as any event in our history."
—The Washington Post
"Morley skillfully weaves his several narrative threads into a vibrant and illuminating picture of the antebellum capital at a time when national stability depended on placating the owners of slaves ... [He] reveals a tangle of back stories that eventually lead deep into a tension-filled landscape of class resentments, provocative abolitionism and proslavery passions. It is a world peopled with vivid characters both black and white, among them, most intriguingly, the city's district attorney, Francis Scott Key, the author of 'The Star-Spangled Banner.'"
—The Wall Street Journal
"An elegant, readable narrative ... Snow-Storm in August touches on themes still relevant today: unresolved racial tensions, simmering resentment over economic disparity, influence peddling among the powerful, and the red-blue divide between conservatives and progressives over whether human property — and their descendants — deserve the full benefits of the new nation's famously stated ideals."
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune
"A stunning new work of cultural history ... Working on a large canvas, Morley succeeds in his ambitious aim to humanize many whose names, faces and voices were lost to time."
—U.S. News & World Report
"In a crackling good tale of the deep impact of race and politics on a young nation struggling to create its identity, Salon Washington correspondent Jefferson Morley boldly and elegantly recreates a moment in time when free black businessmen mingled with their white counterparts while proponents of slavery and abolitionists struggled to co-exist in the nation’s bustling capital."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Jefferson Morley has vividly and factually recreated a largely lost but pivotal time in Jacksonian Washington, an emerging, still somewhat primitive capital city where racial tensions among its complex mix of white, free black, and enslaved residents inevitably lead to violence and push the debate over abolition into the houses of Congress and the President. The historical characters, famous and forgotten, come to life in affecting and surprising ways without fictional artifice, a tribute to Morley's meticulous research and empathetic narrative style."
—Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post
"Morley vividly recreates the episodes connected to the riot, and dramatically depicts the personalities involved, giving important insight into race relations before the Civil War."
—The Columbus Dispatch
"A sprightly social history of the convergence of pro- and anti-slavery agitators in the city of Washington during the explosive summer of 1835. . . . Salon Washington correspondent Morley ably weaves the many strands together: An enterprising restaurateur of mixed race found that his success aroused the ire of resentful white patrons; an impressionable young slave hoping to educate and free himself ran afoul of his white mistress; a Yankee abolitionist newly arrived in town disseminated incendiary emancipationist literature; and the famous author of 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' serving as Jackson’s district attorney, pursued his job of punishing vice and enforcing slavery. . . . Morley alternates the characters and scenes of action for a suspenseful tale, culminating in the court of law where Key upheld the country’s oppression of African-Americans and thereby helped shape the rancorous debate over slavery. . . . Elegant and nimble history of a series of events likely unknown to many readers."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Morley’s gripping, fast-paced narrative captures all the drama that encompasses a rich cast of characters that includes Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, Roger Taney, Sam Houston, and a host of others who inhabited the young nation’s capital ... Morley has given readers a noteworthy, insightful look into an often overlooked chapter in American history."
—Booklist
"Absorbing ... This book reminds us how deeply entrenched proslavery forces were in the nation’s capital and what a struggle it was for African Americans to receive justice and for abolitionists to be heard ... An enlightening account of racial tension in pre-Civil War America."
—BookPage
About the Author
JEFFERSON MORLEY is the Washington correspondent for Salon. He has worked as an editor and reporter at The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, and Harper’s Magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, and Slate. His first book was Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from Chapter One
Beverly Snow did not look like trouble, not hardly. He was a mild--mannered fellow of mixed--race heritage—-in the lingo of the day, a mulatto. The admixture of African and European blood in his veins gave an air of incongruous humor to his countenance. His language was learned, if a little extravagant, for he knew his way around a kitchen and loved to pass cooking time in conversation. To the patrons, white and colored alike, who gathered at his oyster house in the tobacco town of Lynchburg, Virginia, Beverly held forth more as a Creole raconteur than discontented bondsman. In the autumn of 1829, he was certainly better known for his way with words and white men than for any sort of difficulty. He humored the hungry with a steady stream of jokes and japes while doling out fat James River oysters and dispensing a variety of sage epigrams, dubious puns, and enigmatic epiphanies at no extra charge. The fare was salubrious, the conversation light, the prices lighter. That was Beverly’s way.
While it was true that not all white men approved of a colored man doing business in the heart of town, it was more true that Beverly’s friends, John and Susannah Warwick, approved of his enterprise. In Lynchburg that was enough. John was the son of Major William Warwick, a Revolutionary War veteran turned banker who had served as the first mayor of the settlement around John Lynch’s ferry landing back in 1805. Susannah was the daughter of Captain William Norvell, a veteran of Valley Forge and the village’s first clerk. John and Susannah Warwick owned Beverly Snow, but ownership hardly described Susannah’s relationship to him. Beverly was also her friend, almost a big brother.
Beverly had lived for at least a few years in Captain Norvell’s mansion on Federal Hill, the most distinguished enclave in the growing town. Nothing is known of Beverly’s parents other than that one of them, probably his father, was white. Unusually for an enslaved person, Beverly learned to read and write at an early age, perhaps because Captain Norvell had helped establish the first public school in Lynchburg. Along the way, Beverly might have glimpsed one of the great men of the day, former president Thomas Jefferson, who sold a plot of land to William Norvell in 1812. Legend has it that Jefferson visited their house. Beverly, as a servant and cook, might have prepared his meals, perhaps even overheard his conversation. The servant and the statesman would come to share at least one pastime. Jefferson often digressed on his admiration for Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher who espoused a creed of pleasurable moderation in the third century before Christ. Before long, Beverly Snow would do the same.
Susannah Norvell, five years younger than Beverly, came of age eating his food and laughing at his jokes. A sensitive dark--haired beauty, she married John Marshall Warwick, the son of her father’s friend, when she was seventeen years old. She endowed her husband’s mustachioed placidity with the drive of self--improvement, and the young couple flourished. John Warwick had worked in the family dry-goods business since boyhood. As early as 1816, his name appeared on a bill of sale to Jefferson. At age twenty--one John obtained his merchant’s license and turned his attention to tobacco, the cash crop of the hilly counties surrounding Lynchburg. The leafy plant was grown in abandon, bundled into fifteen--hundred--pound hogsheads, inspected, and sold to traders who shipped the leaf to Europe, where segars and pipe smoking were all the rage. Enslaved Africans did most of the work to create this pleasure. White men reaped all of the profits. John Warwick did better than most. He was a rich man well before his thirtieth birthday. His wife had a harder time. Susannah Warwick gave birth to four children, three of whom died before the age of three. In her sorrow, she liked to write and dream of a better world. She loathed the institution of slavery and was unafraid to say so. “It is a stain upon the character of Virginians,” she wrote in her journal, “and one which I hope will not long remain.”
In 1824, Susannah’s father prepared his will. At the time, Captain Norvell owned several Negro families, including twenty--six people. He granted each of his six children the right to take possession of any two. Susannah chose Beverly. By the next year, he had moved in with the Warwicks. In 1826, the couple announced their success to Lynchburg society by building a Federal--style brick house on Court Street along the high bluff overlooking the James River. Beverly perfected his cooking skills in the basement kitchen. He also took a wife, a soon--to--be--free colored girl six years his junior who was known to white people as Judy. She called herself Julia.
Beverly and Julia Snow lived in the same house as John and Susannah Warwick, sharing something of their prosperity and of their sadness. Beverly saw how John coped with the loss of his babies: by serving others. When Lynchburg formed its first board of health in 1828, John became a member. Eventually, John Warwick, like his father, would become the mayor of Lynchburg. With John and Susannah’s support, Beverly and Judy opened the oyster house on Lynch Street to serve customers and workers at John’s nearby tobacco warehouse and others who thronged the busy wharf. It was the kind of informal agreement between owners and bondsmen not unknown in well--established families in Virginia. Beverly, while still the property of his mistress, had permission to keep at least some of the money his customers handed over.
Beverly’s wit soon set the people of Lynchburg to laughing. One tale concerned the Cargills, a strolling family theatrical company that had arrived in 1828. Beverly was not alone in admiring their considerable style. The Cargills arrived in carriages and buggies, while their wardrobes came in baggage wagons. As stage performers, the Cargills were truly distinguished, the locals agreed, not at all resembling the disreputable Crummieses, the acting family lampooned in Charles Dickens’s just--published novel Nicholas Nickleby. Mr. Cargill was a gentleman, and Mrs. Cargill was ladylike and educated. Their daughter, the beautiful Mary, was comely, beloved, and respected. They delighted the town with their comic and tragic performances for much of a year.
Then one morning, Lynchburg awoke to find the Cargills had vanished. The stunned townspeople discovered they would have to pay for their happy suspension of belief about the Cargills’ dramatis personae. The strolling actors had strolled off without a nod to friends or creditors. The young studs who lamented the loss of the phenomenal Mary did not suffer long. But the Cargills’ many business associates did. Those who had provided food and drink, bed and board to these consummate actors could only shake their unpaid bills in impotent fury. When one man wondered aloud how the spendthrift thespians had escaped, Beverly nodded toward the James River.
“I believe, sir,” he sighed, “that the play--actors have concluded to glide smoothly down the stream,” which was certainly one of the greatest euphemisms ever uttered in Lynchburg.
Beverly Snow tasted politics in the summer of 1828 when Secretary of State Henry Clay came to Lynchburg. John Warwick formed a welcoming committee to hail the Kentucky statesman who would pursue the presidency of the United States of America without success for the next three decades. John supported Clay’s “American System,” in which the national government in Washington would use tax and tariff revenues to build roads and canals and make other internal improvements that would enable the people of the young republic to wrest a living from the virgin forests and rolling plains once occupied by the native Indians. To many Lynchburg merchants, Henry Clay’s plan was common sense. New roads and canals would fortify the town’s position as a commercial center between the eastern seaboard and the western frontier.
Beverly Snow, it is safe to say, was less enamored of the slick operator some called “Harry of the West.” When it came to people of color, Clay was a supporter of African colonization. This was a popular scheme of the day that proposed to end the blight of chattel slavery in the United States of America by freeing the enslaved and sending them to settle the western coast of Africa. While the supporters of colonization prided themselves on their humanitarianism toward Negroes, theirs was a benevolence wrapped in a prejudice that Henry Clay voiced as well as any man. Clay especially reviled those Africans in America who had managed to gain their legal freedom. “Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored,” Clay liked to say. “Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them.”
Beverly had no use for such insults. He planned to obtain his freedom within two years and he had other destinations in mind besides Africa. Despite the practice of slavery and the common condescension articulated by the likes of Clay, Beverly was not eager to leave the country where he was born. Truth be told, he often enjoyed life in these United States. In central Virginia, the families of slaves and masters had been intertwined for generations. Countless children of African and European blood, like Susannah Norvell and Beverly Snow, had grown up as siblings, playmates, friends, rivals, and every other human bond. By the early 1800s, the bonds of decency and familiarity, combined with the revolutionary ideology of the War for Independence, had prompted a growing number of white men to let their bondsmen buy their freedom. Some whites freed their slaves in their wills. Others promised freedom to their children. Those were the terms that Beverly had been born into: with a promise of manumission when he reached the age of thirty.
Beverly Snow embodied the reality of America’s race--mixing ways. While the “amalgamation” of whites and blacks was often abhorred, it was also indulged. To cite but one common practice among white people, most white mothers preferred African women to Irish women as wet nurses for their children, finding them altogether more agreeable, affectionate, and trustworthy than their Hibernian counterparts. White men, alas, had baser impulses. They wanted women of color as mistresses, concubines, whores, and occasionally as wives. Beverly, along with plenty of other people, knew the story of Richard Mentor Johnson, a famous Indian fighter turned U.S. senator from Kentucky. Johnson lived openly with a mulatto woman named Julia Chinn, who bore him two daughters of whom he was quite proud. Johnson offended the finer ladies of Frankfort, Kentucky—-and made news nationally—-by attempting to introduce the two girls at a Fourth of July cotillion in 1828. They were rejected by the other white mothers over Johnson’s indignant protests. When Chinn died, Johnson took up with another enslaved African woman named Parthene. While scandalous to the moralists of press and pulpit, Johnson’s domestic arrangements did not impede the upward arc of his political career. And colored men wanted white women. They risked brutal punishment or death for observing, much less sampling, the charms of white women, which didn’t mean that more than a few black fools didn’t try. Among the lowest classes of whites, some women were notorious for favoring Africans as lovers. The less scrupulous among them used their wiles to extract money favors from the duller Negroes. Even the white man’s most savage treatment of these aspiring Othellos—-and the white woman’s shaming of their sisterly Desdemonas—-could not extirpate such forbidden desires. Coupling and procreating had a stubborn pride that disregarded taboo and teaching. It was natural that Beverly Snow’s mother had named him after a white man, Beverley Randolph, who had served as Virginia’s eighth governor in 1788. By heritage and upbringing, Beverly lived in a racially mixed society that pretended it was anything but.
The question facing Beverly in 1829 was whether he should stick around Lynchburg or seek his fortune elsewhere. Beverly needed no reminder that his thirtieth birthday was approaching. If the good news was that he would soon be free, the bad news was that the Commonwealth of Virginia required his removal. According to an 1806 statute, any enslaved person of African descent who obtained his or her freedom had to leave the state within a year or else “be apprehended and sold” back into slavery. Beverly could remain in Lynchburg only if a white man petitioned the state legislature for permission. With an owner as friendly as Susannah Warwick, Beverly might have been able to stay if he wanted. Instead he made plans to depart.
Lynchburg had little to offer a free man of color. The slave traders supplying the tobacco planters with coerced Negro laborers dominated the town’s life. A carpenter from the area named Pleasant Roane summed up the appalling difficulties he faced at that time. The free black man, Roane said, was “denied the use and enjoyment of many of the most valuable rights and privileges of freemen [and] subjected in all cases of offences to the most vigorous exactions of penal law.” As a result, he added, most free blacks sank into “a state of contempt and degradation.”
Beverly figured Washington City could not treat him worse than that. The capital lay in the District of Columbia, located 180 miles northeast of Lynchburg, a ride of several days by coach. Such proximity generated some awareness of its attractions and dangers. Yes, the capital city was known as a perennially indebted municipality of dubious morals. Yes, its haphazard streets and well--hidden charms evoked laughter among European tourists and Virginia squires alike. And yes, there were stories of free colored men who had visited the capital of liberty only to be kidnapped and sold into slavery. But the capital was changing. In the recent presidential election, General Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, had won more votes than incumbent John Quincy Adams. The first westerner elected to the presidency, Jackson was inaugurated in March 1829 before a vast and adoring crowd. If nothing else, Beverly and Julia could live and work there legally. The capital beckoned not as a promised land but as a refuge, a haven where a colored man just might have room enough to prove himself.
In November 1829, Beverly’s day came. Susannah Norvell Warwick did her part to end the stain of slavery on herself and her state by agreeing to manumit her bondsman. Beverly and her husband walked two blocks to the Lynchburg courthouse, where John handed the justice of the peace a handwritten deed of freedom. The justice of the peace copied its standard language into a big bound volume. In exchange for five dollars, John Warwick attested that he did “emancipate, set free, and relinquish all Manner of right to the personal Services of my man Slave Beverly, commonly called Beverly Snow.”
John Warwick signed the deed and set his seal in red wax. Snow walked out onto Court Street a free American.
Most helpful customer reviews
33 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
Arthur Bowen's unhappy fall
By J. Green
In between the War for Independence and the Civil War calls for the abolition of slavery began to grow in number and volume, but few people could imagine whites and former black slaves living peacefully side-by-side. Some favored re-settling freed slaves in Africa or the Caribbean, but understandably most blacks viewed America as their home and didn't relish the idea of being shipped off to a land they'd never known. But it didn't stop a few abolitionists from agitating in southern states, and scattered reports of slave uprisings caused fear and anxiousness among those who owned such "human property."
Jefferson Morley tells the story of combustible race relations in 1835 in the young American capitol. Arthur Bowen, a young slave owned by Anna Thornton (widow of William Thornton, designer of the U. S. Capitol) who enjoyed a fair amount of liberty, came home very drunk late one night. What is known about the confusing events is that he picked up an axe and entered his mistresses' bedroom where his own mother also slept, and mumbled some drunken threats. His actual intent isn't known but the women panicked and Arthur was eventually arrested and charged with attempted murder. In the already charged atmosphere, mobs of white men quickly formed and threatened to take Arthur to "Judge Lynch."
At the same time a former slave named Beverly Snow (a man, not a woman) ran a popular and successful restaurant in Washington. Unlike Arthur, Beverly did not mix much with those pressing for emancipation, but was very forward and cheeky in promoting himself and his restaurant (which bothered some people). Rumors quickly spread that Snow had made offensive comments about white women, and the two situations combined to feed mob riots which came to be known as the "Snow-Storm."
Morley has written an interesting account of this long forgotten episode of history. He adds in the story of F. S. Key, whose song "The Star-Spangled Banner" was later adopted as the national anthem, and who as District Attorney prosecuted Bowen and Reuben Crandall, a white man who was allegedly circulating abolitionist newspapers. It's not a deep or dry history but is instead very readable, including dialog as it was recorded at the time ("edited for clarity") and it mostly avoids moralizing or making too many judgments. It's an interesting view of the atmosphere and tensions in society as slavery began it's long and painful death. (I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher.)
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
So Close to Perfection...
By Ken McCreless
Although this book goes against my understanding of the Emancipation Proclamation and, more importantly, it's author Abraham Lincoln, I highly recommend it to lovers of history like myself.
"Snow-Storm in August" is written in a nicely flowing manner. I felt as if I were standing in ghost form as Beverly Snow worked his epicurean magic, and as rioting citizens terrorized a town.
I would give the book 5 stars if not for the erroneous accolades given to Abraham Lincoln and his famous proclamation, which freed no one.
Still, buy this book. It won't disappoint.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Amazon Customer
Very good condition, as described. Fast delivery. Very pleased with this purchase.
See all 53 customer reviews...
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