Boston, hotbed of anti-slavery
Boston was the flashpoint of the American Revolution. It’s a city indelibly linked to many of the Founding Fathers, to the midnight ride of Paul Revere, and to George Washington’s fledgling Continental Army, whose first encampment was in Harvard Yard. But Boston also played a central role in a much longer struggle for freedom: the one to end American slavery. Details of the big picture are on view through Aug. 23 in Harvard’s Houghton Library, host of a student exhibit called “Boston’s Crusade Against Slavery.” The sounds of the struggle will be on display as well, at a 5:30 p.m. reading on Wednesday in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room, of samples from the correspondence between poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and politician Charles Sumner. The men, one from Cambridge and the other from Boston, represented two faces of the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War: one quiet and the other outspoken. Longfellow was an...