How slavery really ended

Le type d'article que j'adore découvrir en sirotant mon café le dimanche matin... Sous la plume d'Adam Goodheart, le NY Times nous présente l'histoire peu connue de trois esclaves qui fuient la Virginie au début de la guerre de Sécession. Que devait faire l'officier en charge du fort où les trois esclaves vont chercher un refuge (Fort Monroe)? La Constitution et le Fugitive slave act de 1850 l'obligeaient à rendre les esclaves et Lincoln avait dit en 1860 qu'il n'avait aucune intention de libérer les noirs des plantations du Sud. Butler, l'officier en charge, jouera sur le fait que la Sud est désormais un "autre pays" puisque les états ont fait sécession...

Et j'aime beaucoup cet extrait: Earthshaking events are sometimes set in motion by small decisions. Perhaps the most famous example was when Rosa Parks boarded a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala. More recently, a Tunisian fruit vendor’s refusal to pay a bribe set off a revolution that continues to sweep across the Arab world. But in some ways, the moment most like the flight of fugitive slaves to Fort Monroe came two decades ago, when a minor East German bureaucratic foul-up loosed a tide of liberation across half of Europe. On the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, a tumultuous throng of people pressed against the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie, in response to an erroneous announcement that the ban on travel to the West would be lifted immediately. The captain in charge of the befuddled East German border guards dialed and redialed headquarters to find some higher-up who could give him definitive orders. None could. He put the phone down and stood still for a moment, pondering. “Perhaps he came to his own decision,” Michael Meyer of Newsweek would write. “Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m. precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, ‘Why not?’ . . . ‘Alles auf!’ he ordered. ‘Open ’em up,’ and the gates swung wide.”

Le lien pour l'article au complet:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03CivilWar-t.html?pagewanted=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210