Scott Shane Author Talk: FLEE NORTH

Scott Shane's FLEE NORTH tells a very local story of both tragedy and triumph. It unearths the lost story of Thomas Smallwood, born into slavery in Maryland, who bought his freedom, educated himself and became a shoemaker in Southwest Washington a half-hour walk from the U.S. Capitol. Smallwood began to organize mass escapes from slavery by the wagonload, with the help of a young white partner, Charles Torrey -- and wrote about the escapes in extraordinary satirical dispatches for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany. It was Smallwood, Scott Shane discovered, who gave the underground railroad its name. But Smallwood's daring operation took place against the dark background of the domestic slave trade, which thrived on Washington's mall and at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, shipping thousands of people every year away from their families to the cotton and sugan plantations of the deep south. The book's third major character, Baltimore's Hope Slatter, was the era's dominant slave trader, operating from…