During the period from 1800 to 1835, what was then called Washington City underwent significant social change with regard to slavery. It came to offer more opportunities for free African Americans than any other place in the country, with the possible exception of New Orleans. In 1800 when the city was established, enslaved people outnumbered free blacks by four-to-one. By 1830, free blacks outnumbered those enslaved. Of course, this was also the national capital for slaveholders, and slave trafficking was a thriving enterprise.

In 1829, Beverly Snow, a recently freed slave with extraordinary talents, arrived from Lynchburg, Virginia. He had exceptional cooking skills and a friendly, outgoing manner of wit and charm. After several years of hard work he realized his dream to own and operate his own elegant restaurant, Snow’s Epicurean Eating House. A keen business sense and an amazing ability for promotion helped the restaurant to become an incredibly successful venture. His customers included some of the nation’s most influential people, and the restaurant offered a convivial atmosphere for people of both races.

Snow’s story by itself is fascinating to read, but it is only a small part of a deeply disturbing series of events that occurred in 1835 and involved in key roles the lyricist of “The Star Spangled Banner” and the president of the United States. Jefferson Morley masterfully tells the story (it is really several stories) in his absorbing Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835. This book reminds us how deeply entrenched proslavery forces were in the nation’s capital and what a struggle it was for African Americans to receive justice and for abolitionists to be heard.

Arthur Bowen was an 18-year-old slave owned by Anna Thornton, the widow of William Thornton, who had been architect of the U.S. Capitol. One night in August, Arthur, intoxicated and influenced by talk about freedom, carried an ax into a bedroom where Mrs. Thornton, her mother and Arthur’s mother were asleep. Although the women were awakened when the door opened and no one was harmed, Arthur was arrested and tried for attempted murder. Within days, Reuben Crandall, a white man with a medical background, was arrested for “exhibiting and circulating dangerous and insurrectionary writings.”

These arrests led to the beginning of what became Washington’s first race riot when a mob, composed primarily of poor white men and boys, took to the streets. They were unable to get inside the jail to lynch the prisoners, but the next day, after spreading an unverifiable, unflattering rumor about Snow, they focused on trashing his restaurant. This explains the use of “Snow Riot” or “Snow-Storm” to describe the mob’s actions. As Morley points out, the rioters chose their targets carefully. Their anger was directed toward the small group of black men who were doing the most to change the slave system.

The prosecutor in both criminal cases was Francis Scott Key, who served for seven years as the city’s district attorney. He had grown up on the family plantation with many slaves. He was personally incapable of brutality and freed seven of his own slaves. Key saw himself as a humanitarian and early in his career defended African Americans in court. But he regarded them as inferior people who could not cope with freedom. He was a founder of the American Colonization Society, which believed that African emigration would end slavery here. An important aspect of his job as district attorney was to keep white men from losing their human property. It should be noted as well that Key’s brother-in-law and one of his best friends was Roger Taney, who as chief justice of the Supreme Court is best known for his role in the 1856 Dred Scott decision.

Anna Thornton, the alleged victim in the incident that helped spark the rioting, stands out as a courageous person who went to great lengths to see that as much justice as possible under the circumstances was done. A respected socialite who owned other slaves, she used every means she could to save Arthur’s life, including appeals to President Andrew Jackson.

Morley, the Washington correspondent for Salon, was both an editor and reporter for The Washington Post and The New Republic, among other publications. He is also the author of Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. His important and well-told story of the “Snow-Storm” is an enlightening account of racial tension in pre-Civil War America.

The 10-month struggle in the U.S. Congress in 1850 to resolve questions about the status of the new territories gained in the Mexican War and the future of slavery in present-day New Mexico and Utah could have turned out differently. In reading the officially reported speeches given by a quite diverse group of senators, who felt passionately about their beliefs, one feels that secession by Southern states and the war with the North was imminent.

Three legendary figures in American history—Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun (who was in ill health and died during the session)—participated in the debate. Clay’s leadership was crucial. His Omnibus bill, as it was most often called, proposed eight resolutions that, taken together, he said, represented “a great national scheme of compromise and harmony.” But Clay’s approach unraveled, and Senator Stephen Douglas adroitly saw that the larger proposal was divided into individual bills on which congressmen could vote (or abstain) based on their political interests.

Fergus M. Bordewich brings this dramatic Washington, D.C., setting—as well as California, Texas, New Mexico, New York and Cuba, among other places—to illuminating life in America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union. The difficulties of the Congress became apparent when it took 63 roll call ballots to elect a Speaker of the House of Representatives. In the Senate there were both proslavery and antislavery Whigs and Democrats and slave owners who were Unionists. At one extreme, Jefferson Davis said that human bondage was fully justified by the Bible, validated by the U.S. Constitution and a blessing for the slaves themselves. William Seward, on the other hand, declared there was a “higher law than the Constitution”: God’s law that commanded Christians to disobey laws they considered unjust, in particular those that upheld slavery. Bordewich notes that in the 20th century, civil disobedience on moral grounds would become familiar, but in 1850 Americans on all sides thought such behavior would lead to anarchy.

The author also focuses on the two presidents who served during this period. Zachary Taylor agreed to run as the Whig candidate for president with the understanding that he would be independent of party demands. He refused to campaign at all or to express views on perennial issues. As president, it developed that he was opposed to a compromise. But he died on July 9, and his successor, Millard Fillmore, was in favor of the compromise. Bordewich sees Fillmore as the “most elusive” of all the central figures in the debate. His political base in New York state was a center of Underground Railroad activity and he detested slavery. He saw it, though, as a political problem rather than a moral one and thought the federal government did not have the authority to be for or against it.

Fillmore immediately signed all of the bills that were part of the Compromise except for the Fugitive Slave Act, a drastic overhaul of what many in the South regarded as the ineffectual 1793 law of the same name. He hesitated and perhaps agonized over it for two days before signing it into law. It may have been as much a political calculation as anything else, as he planned to run for the presidency in 1852 and had to consider whether it would be wiser for him to offend the North or the South. As events went forward, Bordewich notes that the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill “would have a more far-reaching impact on the nation’s slavery crisis problem than any other facet of the compromise.”

At the end of the day, California was admitted to the Union as a free state, the New Mexico and Utah territories were created with the issue of slavery to be resolved by popular sovereignty, a Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute was settled in favor of Texas, slave trading was ended in Washington, D.C., and there was the harsh Fugitive Slave Law, which the author considers “the single most intrusive assertion of federal authority enacted during the antebellum period.” And, of course, the Compromise held until the Civil War.

Bordewich, whose other books include Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America and Washington: The Making of the American Capital, has written a rich work that transports us back to a time when leaders realized that only compromise would hold the Union together.

On a hot Florida Friday night in mid-July of 1949, Willie Haven Padgett had little on his mind but a night of dancing and drinking and whatever else that might lead to as he picked up Norma Lee Tyson. After a night of fun at the American Legion Hall in Clermont, they left to head home. Neither they nor the little community of Groveland, Florida, could have had any idea how all of their lives would change in the course of a few hours.

On the way home, Padgett pulled off the road onto a quiet, sandy driveway, where his Ford’s engine rattled noisily and died and his tires sank into the sand. As Norma waited for him to turn the car around, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, two black army veterans, were headed over to Eatonville, an all-black town where they could enjoy a night away from the segregated tensions of Groveland and the surrounding towns. Coming across Padgett and Tyson, the two men stopped to help. Before long, however, Padgett’s deep-seated racism emerged in his attitude and in his remarks to the pair; Shepherd decked Padgett, and he and Irvin knew in an instant that nothing good would come of this event. In a matter of days, Shepherd, Irvin and two other young black men, Charles Greenlee and Ernest Thomas—who became known as the Groveland Boys—stood accused and eventually convicted of raping Norma Lee Tyson.

With rich detail and drawing upon never-before-seen material from the FBI archives, Gilbert King (The Execution of Willie Francis) intersperses the sordid features of this tale of Southern injustice—the many trials and appeals, the eventual acquittal of Shepherd and Irvin, Shepherd’s murder by a disgruntled sheriff—with the story of Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice, then a highly regarded NAACP lawyer who worked tirelessly to acquit the four men. Marshall emerges as a crusader, deeply committed to equal opportunity for blacks, who operated on the principle that “laws can not only provide concrete benefits, they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyhow—for good or evil.” With a cast of characters that seem to come straight out of the pages of an Erskine Caldwell novel—corrupt sheriff Willis McCall; a shady prosecutor; everyday workers who emerge at night in the robes of the KKK—Devil in the Grove is an engrossing chronicle of a little-heard story from the pre-Civil Rights era.

When we hear the word “frontier,” our thoughts often turn to the wild, untamed West, full of wagon trains, cattle drives and little houses on the prairie, where rugged men and women eked out a meager existence in their search for open space, gold or simply a new life. Yet, as historian Scott Weidensaul so eloquently points out in this absorbing chronicle, the earliest frontier in America stretched from the Atlantic coast inland to the high, rugged ranges of the Appalachians, and from the Maritimes to Florida. In the West, he observes, the frontier still seems close to the surface, but in the East, the old backcountry is often buried beneath strip malls and subdivisions. Weidensaul scratches the surface and uncovers the terrain of this lost world where Europeans and Native Americans were creating a new society and a new landscape.

Through brilliantly meticulous storytelling, Weidensaul traces the long history of this first frontier, from the Paleolithic Age through the age of European exploration and colonization, to the clash of imperial powers and pent-up Indian fury that led to the Seven Years’ War. For example, when European explorers arrived on the east coast of North America in the early 16th century, the land teemed with millions of indigenous people, so many that the explorers wondered whether there would be room for them to settle. Indians initially welcomed these settlers, who brought new technologies and goods, a cross-pollination of ideas and cooperation. But these warm feelings soon turned sour, for the Europeans were also rapacious and ruthless, and they started a disease epidemic that decimated the native population.

History comes alive in The First Frontier as Weidensaul retells the stories of many of the individuals whose lives both shaped and were shaped by this rugged, violent and often terrifying frontier. He regales us with tales of settlers such as Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Duston, each captured by the Indians, and their wildly different responses to their captivities. Rowlandson prayed for her captors and clung to her belief in God, interpreting her experiences through the lens of her faith, while Duston exacted violent revenge on her captors.

Weidensaul’s captivating chronicle offers a glimpse of this first frontier that was by turns peaceful and violent, linked by trade, intermarriage, religion, suspicion, disease, mutual dependence and acts of both unimaginable barbarism and extraordinary tolerance and charity.