We all got history

by Nick Salvatore

One chilly December evening in the city of Philadelphia, a twenty-eight-year-old man named Amos Webber opened up a notebook and began to keep a chronicle. He wrote about the weather and about politics, about friends and about family, and he wrote about what it was like to be a black American in a land that still considered those of his skin color to be less than human. The year was 1854. Webber was active in the Underground Railroad, fought in the Civil War, was a leader in the African-American fraternal movement, and was a political activist who never stopped fighting for justice and equality. His was the life of many African-Americans in the nineteenth century, of church and family, of friends and patriotism, of racism, and of pride. Using Webber's own chronicle as its heart, Nick Salvatore's book surrounds Amos's words with an astonishing wealth of research and richness of character and description. We meet escaped slaves and their vengeful masters, Civil War generals and infantryme