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The Divided North: Black and White Families in the Age of Slavery

This presentation co-hosted by Old Bristol Historical Society and Lincoln County Historical Association features Dr. Carol Gardner discussing her book, The Divided North: Black and White Families in the Age of Slavery, a narrative history that follows two northern families throughout the turbulent 19th century. Born eleven months apart in 1798 and 1799, Reuben Ruby and Nathaniel Gordon were neighbors and schoolmates in Portland, Maine. Yet they were worlds apart, separated by temperament, family culture and race: Reuben was Black and Nathaniel was white. The Rubys became prominent antislavery activists and operatives on the Underground Railroad. The Gordons became well-to-do ship masters: among them, the most notorious American slave captain of the century: Nathaniel Gordon III. Absent from history books for over a century, these two families offer a detailed portrait of life in the so-called “Free North” when slavery enthralled the nation. Their lives—as activists, traders, agents on the Underground Railroad, soldiers, slave captains, blockade runners, prospectors and politicians—took them far from home: to New York, California, Texas, Louisiana, Africa, Cuba, Colombia and Brazil. But they returned to Maine again and again. As families and individuals, the Rubys and Gordons help us to explore slavery and freedom, racism and equality in America. They help reveal what it meant to live in a free state, with all the promise, disappointment, irony and hope that the notion entailed. Carol Gardner has more than 30 years’ experience as a writer and journalist. She earned a Ph.D. in English from The Johns Hopkins University, taught literature and writing at Johns Hopkins, Wake Forest, and Florida State Universities, and has published pieces in a wide variety of books and periodicals, including the Portland Press Herald and The Washington Post. She is a past winner of a Maryland Individual Artist’s Award. Dr. Gardner is the author of a narrative history, The Involuntary American: A Scottish Prisoner’s Journey to the New World, and the forthcoming The Divided North: Black and White Families in the Age of Slavery. She lives in Alna, Maine.