BARBARA F. BERENSON: BOSTON AND THE CIVIL WAR: HUB OF THE SECOND REVOLUTION
Wayland Library, Tueday evening, April 14th, 7:00
Come hear Barbara F. Berenson discuss her new book, Boston and the Civil War: Hub of the Second Revolution. The book explains how Boston, for the second time, changed the fate of the nation. Inspired by their Patriot forefathers and nurtured in the nation's "cradle of liberty," Boston's abolitionists sparked a Second American Revolution - this one intended to force the nation to live up to the promises of liberty and equality contained in the Declaration of Independence.
William Lloyd Garrison, the Boston-based publisher of the nation's leading abolitionist newspaper, enthusiastically recruited blacks and women to join his crusade. Wayland's Lydia Maria Child, author of the nation's first anti-slavery book, was among his most important allies. For several decades, the Boston abolitionists led a dramatic campaign against both southern slavery and Boston's "lords of the loom" whose textile fortunes depended on slave-grown cotton. Child also became a leader in the emerging women's rights movement. When the abolitionist's lengthy struggle finally provoked the secession of the South and the outbreak of Civil War, Boston's activists tirelessly campaigned for expanding Union war goals to include Emancipation and, ultimately, a constitutional amendment permanently eradicating slavery from the nation.
Berenson is the author of Walking Tours of Civil War Boston: Hub of Abolitionism, an official Guidebook of the Freedom Trail Foundation (2011, 2nd ed. 2014). She is co-editor of Breaking Barriers: The Unfinished Story of Women Lawyers and Judges in Massachusetts (2012). A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Berenson works as a senior attorney at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.