On the eve of the civil war, in 1860 in Troy, New York, a group of blacks and whites, including Harriet Tubman, struggled to free Charles Nalle from slave hunters sent to return him to bondage in Virginia. Nalle, a man of mixed race, so fair-skinned he could have passed for white but didn't, had escaped slavery because he feared that his heavily indebted master planned to sell him. His wife and children, emancipated on their master's death, had already moved to nearby Washington, D.C. Nalle had hoped to eventually reunite with his family in Canada. Christianson sets Nalle's rescue in the broader context of slave escapes, the Underground Railroad, the abolition movement, and questions of civil disobedience. The Nalle incident occurred a few months after John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry and tested convictions of the black and white citizens of Troy in challenging the Fugitive Slave Law. Christianson explores the complications of the law, and he captures the drama of Nalle's escape and attempted recapture and the complexities of citizens willing to defy the law for a higher principle.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist