A Star-Spangled Speech Trial

03/07/24 • 51 min

2 Listeners

In 1835, Washington D.C. was a city on edge: tensions over race and slavery were nearing a boiling point. District Attorney Francis Scott Key (author of the national anthem!) was tasked with maintaining order in the city. But when Key charged a man named Reuben Crandall with distributing anti-slavery pamphlets, he unwittingly set off an explosive chain of events...

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History on Trial - A Star-Spangled Speech Trial

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:01.040

You are listening to History on Trial, a production of iHeart Podcasts. Listener discretion advised. In August eighteen thirty one, rebellion broke out in Southampton County, Virginia. Like the American Revolution only fifty years before, the revolt in Southampton was motivated by a desire for freedom, but the stakes here were much graver than taxation without representation. The rebels in eighteen thirty one were enslaved and free black people,