About this item
A riveting account of the extraordinary abolitionist, liberator, and writer Thomas Smallwood, who bought his own freedom, led hundreds out of slavery, and named the underground railroad, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Scott Shane. Flee North tells the story for the first time of an American hero all but lost to history.Born into slavery, Thomas Smallwood was free, self-educated, and working as a shoemaker a short walk from the U.S. Capitol by the 1840s. He recruited a young white activist, Charles Torrey, and together they began to organize mass escapes from Washington, Baltimore, and surrounding counties to freedom in the north.They were racing against an implacable enemy: men like Hope Slatter, the region's leading slave trader, part of a lucrative industry that would tear one million enslaved people from their families and sell them to the brutal cotton and sugar plantations of the deep south.
About the Author
Scott Shane is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he covers national security. His new book, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President and the Rise of the Drone, examines the life and death of the late American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011 at the orders of President Obama. In addition to the debate over terrorism and targeted killing, he has written on the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden's leaked documents; WikiLeaks and confidential State Department cables; and the Obama's administration's prosecution of leaks of classified information, including a lengthy profile of John Kiriakou, the first C.I.A. officer to be imprisoned for leaking. During the Bush administration, he wrote widely on the debate over torture, and his 2007 articles on interrogation, written with several colleagues, were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has also written on the anthrax investigation, the evolving terrorist threat, the government's secret effort to reclassify historical documents and the explosion in federal contracting.
From 1983 to 2004, he was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, covering a range of beats from courts to medicine and writing series of articles on brain surgery, schizophrenia, a drug corner, guns and crime and other topics. He was The Sun's Moscow correspondent from 1988 to 1991 and wrote a book on the Soviet collapse, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union, which the Los Angeles Times described as "one of the essential works on the fall of the Soviet Union." In 1995, he co-wrote a six-part explanatory series of articles on the National Security Agency, the first major investigation of NSA since James Bamford's 1982 book The Puzzle Palace. His series on a public health project in Nepal won the nation's top science-writing award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001.
He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Francie Weeks, who teaches English to foreign students. They have three children.
