A Freak Snowstorm In August? Not In North Dakota

This story had everything! The first restaurant (in our sense of the term, where you were waited upon and offered a variety of fare to choose from) in the nation's capital where its co-founder was a free black man, the writer of “The Star-Spangled Banner” arguing for the prosecution in an attempted murder trial, a new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, abolitionism becoming this close to restricted speech, a woman's seeking a Presidential pardon … all of it and more, better told than I'm telling it now, in Jefferson Morley's Snow-Storm in August (ISBN 9780385533379) with perhaps the most interesting subtitle I've read this year.

“Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835”

You may have guessed that Snow refers not to precipitation but rather to a person, in this case Beverly Snow the free black man we referred to above. In a time when free blacks outnumbered enslaved blacks for the first time in the city, it didn't take much for someone to stand out and become the target of a white mens' mob's rage. Couple this with an attempted murder – so a slave coming into his mistress' room with an axe was thought to be at the time, but denials were everywhere – as well as awkwardly stumbling into the future that only a friend against friend brother against brother war would resolve decades later, and it was hard to put this book down!

“A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary”

That's an interesting subtitle I read at the turn of the century. Anyway, it's amazing how little history we actually know and once we're willing to get past our own ideas what shows up. I certainly didn't know as much about Francis Scott Key. Oh, I knew he was an attorney but not where, I knew the story of his inspiration to write the words to what's now our national anthem (didn't gain that honor until 1931, after an act of Congress passed from an American Legion-sponsored resolution written in anger at a singing of “The Internationale” two years ago), but not that he had ten children or he was Roger Taney's brother-in-law (the chief justice you probably know better for the Dred Scott decision).

But say what you want of Taney, or for that matter much of slave-holding (or at least slave-tolerating) America in the first half of the nineteenth century, we could learn a thing or two regarding their respect for the Constitution. Even at the height of this country's Civil War, Lincoln wrangled with using his Presidential power to just abolish slavery outright – Canada had by default when the British Empire did so in 1833 – and also proposed colonization vs. citizenship at first, until public opinion was ready to shift in favor of emancipation. Granted, one of our issues today is universal health care, just one among many, but it seems to insinuate into every other decision we make. It's hard today to imagine the mindset of a slave-holder in our early twenty-first century … but not by much. Who's the other to you?

And the irony of writing and posting this NOW is that it is snowing and blowing now as I see outside my office window and read that it is one degree. And it feels like it's eighteen degrees below zero this close to one p.m. Central Standard Time. I'd finished yesterday, and though I usually devote the lion's share of my text to what's going on with me and my family and only mention books I've read as a sideline, I chose to reverse that ratio today because … well, something clicked. The kids are warm at school, Martha and I are warm – well, she's not as warm because as a courier she steps in and out of her van and in and out of her buildings, but I pray she's doing a lot better for some food disagreed with her yesterday – at our jobs, and we will be getting stronger and healthier every day!

Who's excited with me even in a snowstorm? David