Public historian and researcher Milt Diggins will discuss his new publication Stealing Freedom Along the Mason-Dixon Line: Thomas McCreary, the Notorious Slave Catcher from Maryland at this October Regional History Colloquium. “Thomas McCreary was a slave catcher and kidnapper unconcerned for the difference between the two activities. He lived in Cecil County, Maryland, the mid-point between Philadelphia, a refuge for freedom seekers, and Baltimore, a major slave market. McCreary and his community provide a close up view of the toxic effects the debate over slavery had on the country in the years leading up to the Civil War” (Diggins). Diggins’ presentation will shed light on the fascinating historical figure who earned a living hunting down escaped slaves around the Philadelphia area in the decades preceding the Civil War. McCreary’s story collides with Lancaster’s at the Christiana Resistance and its aftermath.
Milt Diggins, M.ed., is an independent scholar, author, public historian, and lecturer from Cecil County, Maryland. He serves on the Historical Society of Cecil County Board of Trustees and has taught in the county’s public school and community college. Stealing Freedom is Diggins’ second book, after Images of America: Cecil County. He has also been published in Cecil Historical Journal, Maryland Historical Magazine, and Cecil Whig.
The colloquium Stealing Freedom Along the Mason-Dixon Line will take place on Thursday, October 27, 2016 in Ryder Hall at LancasterHistory.org, 230 N President Avenue, Lancaster. A social gathering with refreshments and a booksigning by the author will begin at 4pm, followed by the lecture from 4:30-5:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.
LancasterHistory.org’s Presidential Lecture for October will feature Doug Egerton, Ph.D. who will discuss Black Activism and Reconstruction in the North. Republican politicians and white reformers invariably thought of Reconstruction as a policy aimed at the defeated Confederacy. Black activists and veterans knew better. As Frederick Douglass once said during the conflict, this was a war of “national reclamation.” Black Pennsylvanians were among the largest state contingents in the pioneering African-American units, the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Infantry regiments, yet as in Lincoln’s Illinois, these soldiers could not vote in the Quaker State, even at the war’s end. In a series of northern conventions starting in 1864, black activists demanded not merely the death of slavery, but voting rights and social equality in every state. This talk chronicles the struggle to make Reconstruction a national movement and shows, as the 1871 Election Day assassination of Philadelphia teach and activist Octavius Catto reminds us, that many Americans gave their last full measure of devotion long after formal combat ended in 1865.
For the first Regional History Colloquium of the 2016-2017 Series, LancasterHistory.org welcomes Paul Kahan, Ph.D. who will present a lecture on his most recent publication Amiable Scoundrel: Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s Scandalous Secretary of War. From abject poverty to undisputed political boss of Pennsylvania, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, senator, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a founder of the Republican Party, Simon Cameron was one of the 19th-century’s most prominent political figures. In his wake, however, he left a series of questionable political and business dealings, and, at the age of eighty, even a sex scandal.
Paul Finkelman, Ph.D. will return to LancasterHistory.org to discuss his research on The Pennsylvania Connection: Black Freedom, Reconstruction, & Keystone State Leadership. This year we celebrate the sesquicentennial of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the passage by Congress of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which revolutionized citizenship in America, put the final nail in the coffin of American slavery, and set the stage (ultimately) for the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s. With the second largest delegation in the House of Representatives, Pennsylvanians played a major role in Congress during the 1860s. The key player in the struggle to create meaningful civil rights in America was Thaddeus Stevens, who represented Lancaster County in the House of Representatives. Few members of the House are more important in our history—and more controversial—than Stevens.
