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.
About Jefferson Morley
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.
Editorial Review
A sprightly social history of the convergence of pro- and anti-slavery agitators in the city of Washington during the explosive summer of 1835. The forces that would soon tear the country apart in civil war were already at work in Washington as President Andrew Jackson was away on vacation.Salon Washington correspondent Morley (Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, 2008, etc.) 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. By July 1835, news of a slave rebellion in Mississippi had already created unease among white Washingtonians. When the young slave Arthur Bowen broke into the bedroom of his mistress, Anna Thornton, in the middle of the night on August 5, inebriated and carrying an axe, the city exploded in rumor and fear. Bowen had apparently been influenced by the antislavery literature of New Yorker Reuben Crandall, whom Key subsequently arrested and charged with “attempting to excite an insurrection.” A mob formed, threatening to lynch Bowen, and destroying much property, including mixed-race entrepreneur Beverly Snow’s popular Epicurean Eating House. Despite Thornton’s attempts to protect her beloved slave, Bowen was convicted and sentenced to hang. 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. His brother-in-law Roger Taney (whom Key supported to power) would become chief justice of the Supreme Court and author of the Dred Scott decision. – Kirkus Reviews
Snow-Storm in August by Jefferson Morley
Barnes & Noble Review – July 4, 2012 (Excerpt)
Beverly Snow was a free man of color who owned and operated the Epicurean Eating House in Washington, D.C., in 1835. It was a class act — Would you like guava jelly with your plover, ortolans to complement your green turtle? — and Snow an artful, entertaining host. But Snow is also a foil for Jefferson Morley’s other Washington in Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835, a betwixt-and-between place with the South below and the North above. “High finance and human slavery were reconciled in the coordinates of the new capital city,” and for every Beverly Snow, there were multiple black men and women “sold at a slave pen at Third Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, [or] taken in chains from the alley behind G Street.”
The 1830s, at this remove, may themselves appear to be betwixt and between, quiet years with big conflicts receding in memory (independence and the War of 1812) or yet to come (the secession and bloodbath of the 1860s). In fact, they were a seriously tense time, especially for border areas like Washington, and this is what Morley so convincingly and intensely captures. Rebellions by the enslaved populations were breaking out — General Nat’s Southampton, Virginia, uprising had just been bloodily quashed, and the Mississippi slave revolt was in progress — and these flares of violence set a polychromatic background against which the Washington riot plays out. [Read the full article...]
“Snow-Storm in August” by Jefferson Morley
The Washington Post Book Review – July 27, 2012 (Excerpt)
In popular American history, the decades between the founding era and the Civil War are a sort of no-man’s land, largely glossed over if not ignored entirely. There are, of course, exceptions. Daniel Walker Howe explored the richness of the period in “What Hath God Wrought” and won the Pulitzer Prize for his trouble. Andrew Jackson commands a new volume with some regularity. Mostly, though, the era is treated as a dreary interregnum between those plucky patriots with powdered hair and the appalling carnage of the war over slavery.
In “Snow-Storm in August,” former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley fills in some of the blanks, assembling a portrait of Washington in the 1830s by exploring characters who inhabit the second tier of history or well below. The 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. Beverly Snow, an enterprising mulatto slave in Lynchburg, Va., is freed by his owners and reinvents himself as a leading restaurateur in the nation’s capital. Nat Turner’s bloody slave rising in Virginia triggers a nationwide spasm of fear. The American Colonization Society blindly pursues its mad scheme of shipping millions of freed slaves to Africa, or the Caribbean, or anywhere but the United States. [Read the full article...]
Advertisement
DOODLEBUGS & SPITFIRES
Memories and Short Stories by Peter Carroll
“Doodlebugs & Spitfires” is a delightful collection of memories and short stories written by Peter Carroll, the author of “Queen of Misfortune,” in his trademark poetic and profoundly thoughtful style.
Most of his stories, previously published in limited form in local English newspapers and magazines, like “Brave New World”, “The Forties Street Tradesmen”, “Doodlebugs”, or “The Christmas of 43” evolve around his childhood in the Northern part of London during and after World War II. He describes the horrors that came with the V1 flying bombs, nicknamed the “Doodlebugs.” Heroic British pilots in their “Spitfire” airplanes would attempt to divert the flying bombs from the populated areas, sometimes successful, and sometimes not.
Doodlebugs & Spitfires is available at Amazon.Com and its Kindle store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle store, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.
