This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

Our next story comes to us from Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Scott

Shane. Shane is the author of Flea North, Forgotten Hero, and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's

Borderland. Let's take a listen.

The central character of my book is a guy named Thomas Smallwood, and I just want to take you to what he was up to in 1842.

He's a man who had been born in slavery, had basically educated himself, built a business as a shoemaker,

and he was living about a 15-minute walk from the United States Capitol in southeast Washington.

By day, he's running this shoemaking business to support his family.

He has a wife and four kids and a fifth kid on the way. At night, he's organizing these mass escapes by the wagon load. And even as he's doing all this during the day

and at night, he somehow is finding time to write up a new dispatch for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany, New York,

which used the real names of the slaveholders and the real names of the people escaping from them,

and basically were based on the satirical style of Charles Dickens,

and he wrote them using a pseudonym from Charles

Dickens because everything he was doing was illegal, and he was in danger of arrest at any

moment. And what he wrote was the only real-time, firsthand accounts of escapes from slavery

ever published.

They were so much in real time that sometimes he writes,

he had held a particular dispatch for a week or two to make sure the people he's writing about

had made it to safety in upstate New York or Canada.

So this is Thomas Smallwood.

His own experience of slavery had been relatively benign.

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