Community rallies around victim of McDonald's attack
Bystander who intervened describes melee; 18-year-old suspect denied bail
By Erica L. Green and Nick Madigan, The Baltimore Sun

The family of a transgender woman who was attacked in a Baltimore County McDonald's last week thanked the woman who stepped in and tried to help, as more than a hundred supporters gathered at the Rosedale restaurant Monday night. The rally drew together representatives of transgender, civil-rights and faith-based communities in a call to action to stop violence against all people.

"I'll never forget you for this," Renee Polis told Vicky Thoms, who was hit in the face as she stepped between Chrissy Polis and the two teens who were caught on video punching and kicking Polis, and dragging her by her hair until Polis appears to have a seizure.

The attack was filmed by a McDonald's employee and was first posted on YouTube last week. Despite being removed from the video-sharing site, it quickly went viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views after being linked from several websites, including the Drudge Report.

Stepping into the McDonald's restaurant on April 18, the 55-year-old Thoms stumbled onto the attack — she said she saw a woman cowering on the floor outside a restroom as two other women pummeled her.

Stunned, Thoms watched for about two minutes, wondering what to do. Then, despite her fear of aggravating a back injury, Thoms said she stepped in, and was punched in the face while doing so.

"I couldn't take it any more," Thoms recalled Monday. "I thought, 'They're going to kill her.' "

Teonna Monae Brown, 18, was charged with first-degree assault and two counts of second-degree assault in the attack. Brown — who was charged with assaulting another woman in the same restaurant a year ago — was ordered held without bail Monday at the Baltimore County Detention Center. Brown's companion, a 14-year-old girl, was charged with second-degree assault in last week's incident.

Court records show that Brown was involved in a previous confrontation with a woman on July 27, 2010, at the same McDonald's on Kenwood Avenue. The victim in that case, Danielle K. Dower, ultimately asked prosecutors to drop assault charges against Brown.

Polis, who will turn 23 this week, appeared to suffer a seizure during the attack, as well as cuts to her face and mouth. She was taken to Franklin Square Hospital Center for treatment of her wounds and later gave interviews in which she said that no one but Thoms had come to her aid.

Polis called the attack a hate crime, and the Baltimore County State's Attorney said Monday that he has not ruled out adding other charges to the case.

"We're looking at both defendants in regards to the whole case and we are reviewing the case for the possibility of additional charges," said State's Attorney Scott D. Shellenberger. Referring to the 14-year-old and the likelihood of her being charged as an adult, the prosecutor said, "We're looking at the proper place for her case to be."

Asked whether he was considering charges against the McDonald's employee who shot video of the attack with his cellphone but apparently did not intervene or report it to the police, Shellenberger said that Maryland law does not impose punishment on bystanders who fail to help a person being attacked. Only people who are deemed to have aided and abetted a crime can be charged in such circumstances, he said. The employee was fired from the restaurant after the incident.

Attempts to protect transgender people have foundered in the Maryland legislature. Earlier this month, delegates rejected an antidiscrimination measure that would have prevented employers, creditors and housing providers from discriminating against transgender people. A clause dealing with discrimination in public accommodations, which would have included places such as restaurants, was stripped out of the proposed law even before it went to a vote said Del. Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk, the sponsor of House Bill 235, known as the Gender Identity Anti-Discrimination Act.

Peña-Melnyk wrote an email Monday to her colleagues in the General Assembly in which she included a link to the video of the attack, warning them that it is "disturbing and portrays a horrific hate crime" that had brought "shame to the state of Maryland for allowing such things to take place."

She said that such incidents "illustrate why the transgender community in Maryland and elsewhere needs to be protected through antidiscrimination legislation."

Other politicians also weighed in. "Although this vicious attack was an isolated incident and in no way reflects on the Baltimore County or Rosedale communities, it does serve as a wake up call that we all have a role to play in moving society forward," Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz said in a statement issued by his office. "It is the conversations around our dinner tables and the casual chatter among friends that develop patterns of behavior. Each and every one of us plays a role in deciding what kind of a society we deserve and what kind of a society we will help create."

According to a court document, Thoms "attempted to separate the suspects" from Polis and was punched and pushed by the two assailants. Darick Jones, the restaurant's manager, told police that Thoms became "disoriented" after being punched. The suspects then pushed Thoms away while the attack on Polis continued, the document said.

Polis "fell to the ground after struggling to fend off the suspects and the two suspects fled the area," according to the document. The brawl apparently had erupted after Polis had tried to use the women's bathroom.

In the interview in the kitchen of her home on Monday, Thoms said she had stepped in because she feared the assault on Polis might be fatal. She also said she had no idea the victim was transgender, but added that it would not have mattered.

She said the employee who shot the video did not try to help and warned the suspects to leave because the police were on their way. Of the video, she said, "It makes me sick to watch it."

The video, she said, lasts only about three minutes, but the actual assault went on for ten. "It's terrible that a human being had to go through that," said Thoms, who expressed a wish to see Polis again and "give her a hug."

The rally on Monday evening outside the McDonald's, where organizers took donations for Polis, was "in support of peace," a billboard at the site said. At one point, the crowd swayed to "We shall overcome."

Polis' twin brother, Matthew, and their mother, Renee, both greeted Thoms and thanked her. Renee Polis said that when she saw the video, "I was scared for my daughter… Now, I'm angry."

"I was upset that I wasn't there — that bothered me," Matthew Polis said. "I couldn't watch the video, but I had to watch the video. There's a lot of people out there who wouldn't have taken a stand."

Renee Polis said that she was concerned when her son first began the process of changing gender. "I always had to worry about her as a mom, but I didn't think someone would beat her half to death for being who she is today."

"I hope they pay for what they've done," she said.

Caroline Temmermand, who belongs to several support groups for the transgender community, told the crowd that the video was "shocking to all of us" and that "violence against anybody just shouldn't be."

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said, "This is not new in Baltimore — this happens all the time."

"It's not OK," she said. "It is not moral. It's not something we should all be OK living with."

nick.madigan@baltsun.com

'Atlas Shrugged' finally comes to the screen, albeit in chunks

A capitalist taken with Ayn Rand's 1957 novel spends almost 20 years and $20 million of his own money to get the first third of it filmed.

By Rebecca Keegan, Los Angeles Times

It has taken businessman John Aglialoro nearly 20 years to realize his ambition of making a movie out of "Atlas Shrugged," the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand that has sold more than 7 million copies and has as passionate a following among many political conservatives and libertarians as "Twilight" has among teen girls.

But the version of the book coming to theaters Friday is decidedly independent, low-cost and even makeshift. Shot for a modest $10 million by a first-time director with a cast of little-known actors, "Atlas Shrugged: Part I," the first in an expected trilogy, will play on about 300 screens in 80 markets. It's being marketed with the help of conservative media and "tea party" organizing groups and put into theaters by a small, Salt Lake City-based booking service.

The fact that one of the 20th century's most influential books is coming to movie screens in such a fashion is — depending on whom you ask — a reflection of liberal Hollywood's aversion to Rand's ideas, a symptom of Aglialoro's rigid adherence to them, or a testament to the challenges inherent in adapting the complex tome.

 

Aglialoro ultimately made a movie that hews more to Rand's ideology than the conventions of cinematic storytelling, at the risk that far fewer people will see it. Taking a page from the independent blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ," however, he is paying for his own theater bookings and marketing his film to an audience Hollywood often overlooks.

The novel takes place in an unspecified future in which the U.S. is mired in a deep depression. Heroine Dagny Taggart is trying to save her railroad company from collapse amid increasing government control and a mysterious phenomenon causing the nation's leading industrialists to disappear. "Atlas Shrugged" lays out Rand's passionate defenses of capitalism and individualism, and has been a source of inspiration to figures as varied as Alan Greenspan and Angelina Jolie.

The 97-minute film is a faithful adaptation of the first third of the book, with some adjustments made for modern audiences: It takes place in the year 2016, when gasoline costs $37.50 a gallon, train travel predominates and clothes, cellphones and offices look pretty much as they do on a "Law & Order" rerun. Dagny, played by Taylor Schilling of the now-canceled television show "Mercy," is still trying to hold Taggart Transcontinental together. She's building a train line with a new metal alloy made by the man who is also her love interest, steel magnate Hank Rearden (former "True Blood" werewolf Grant Bowler). Much of the film's dialogue comes straight from Rand's often didactic prose and, perhaps as a result of the quick and thrifty adaptation, some dramatic action scenes are left out and key props, like a supposedly groundbreaking motor, look more jury-rigged than cutting-edge.

The graphic sex scenes of the novel are considerably toned down, earning the film a PG-13 rating and making Rand's story somewhat more palatable to the Christian family audiences who are among those the filmmakers hope to court. "Atlas Shrugged" has long been a sacred text among many conservatives and libertarians, but as an atheist who had an open marriage and wrote unapologetically sexual characters, Rand doesn't fit neatly into any Christian values-based marketing plan.

In February, the producers began to share the film with people likely to be in accord with the author's views. They showed footage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, unveiling a trailer that has since been downloaded more than a million times on YouTube, and screened the final cut for influential conservatives like House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and commentator Andrew Breitbart. They enlisted Freedomworks, the political organizing group behind many tea party events, to help promote it, and started advertising with posters that said "Who Is John Galt?," the first line of the book and a meaningful catchphrase for Rand's acolytes.

Part of the marketing for "Atlas Shrugged: Part I" relies on the movie's status as a product, as Fox News host Sean Hannity has described it, that "liberal Hollywood doesn't want you to see."

The real story of what kept "Atlas" out of movie theaters for so long is a bit more complicated.

During Rand's lifetime, the author stymied "The Godfather" producer Al Ruddy's attempts to make a movie of "Atlas Shrugged" by demanding veto power over every frame. Rand, who was also a screenwriter, had adapted her 1947 novel "The Fountainhead" herself for a 1949 movie starring Gary Cooper, and was irked by a single line cut from the final film. A book like "Atlas Shrugged," at more than 1,000 pages, dense with philosophical ideas and containing a character's speech that covers 57 pages, would require major changes in its adaptation for screen.

"I said, 'Look, Ayn, the language of film is different,'" Ruddy recalled. "John Galt says goodbye to America for 60 … pages. In a book it can be charming, but in film you look foolish."

After the Ruddy deal and another for an NBC miniseries fell apart, Rand worked on her own screenplay for "Atlas Shrugged" right up until her death in 1982. Her fantasy casting for the leads were Farrah Fawcett and Clint Eastwood. "She loved 'Charlie's Angels,'" said Anne C. Heller, author of "Ayn Rand and the World She Made." "They were like Dagny with guns."

In 1992, the heir to Rand's estate sold a 15-year option on the book's rights to Aglialoro for $1 million. "This is the greatest epic that's never been made into a movie," said Aglialoro, who is now chief executive of the exercise equipment manufacturer Cybex. "I was like, 'I don't need a 15-year lease. This is done in 18 months.'"

The businessman, now 67, had first read "Atlas Shrugged" while working as a stock and bond trader on Wall Street in the early 1970s. "It was a stunning realization," Aglialoro said. "It gave a political poetry to capitalism — capitalism as the only moral way people should live in this world." Aglialoro would fashion himself into a kind of Randian hero, owning and operating more than 30 companies and winning a U.S. poker championship.

Over the next 18 years (he bought extensions on his option), Aglialoro developed several ill-fated scripts. One attempt to get the book greenlighted as a miniseries at TNT got caught in post-9/11 concerns about the novel's apocalyptic setting, according to Ruddy, who worked on it. A feature screenplay, by "Braveheart" writer and "Secretariat" director Randall Wallace, was set up at Lionsgate in 2007 with Angelina Jolie attached to play Dagny. According to a source close to Lionsgate, the project fell apart when Aglialoro's commitment to the book's philosophical messages clashed with the studio's aims to make the story more cinematic. According to Aglialoro, the multiple parties couldn't agree on a director.

"There are two big factors that I sense have frightened filmmakers about 'Atlas Shrugged,'" Wallace said. "One is the reverence with which Rand's followers hold the novel and the other is the sprawling nature of the story. I believed to climb that mountain I'd have to shrug off both those fears."

Meanwhile, Rand was gaining a new currency with readers. After several years of selling about 75,000 copies a year, sales of "Atlas Shrugged" spiked during the recent recession, reaching 500,000 in 2009, according to the Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Irvine.

 

By March of 2010, Aglialoro had three months to get a film into production or the book's rights would revert to Rand's estate. "It was my wife who said you better get the hell out there and do it," he said.

By necessity, the picture came together hastily, with Aglialoro bringing on Harmon Kaslow, a producer of low-budget horror and action films, to produce, and hiring Brian Patrick O'Toole, a writer with some horror credits, to work on the script (in a practice unusual for a producer, Aglialoro also took a screenplay credit on the film). Just 11 days before the start of production, after a six-hour meeting at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, Aglialoro hired his director, Paul Johansson, who is best known for acting on television's "One Tree Hill."

Johansson, who had directed some episodes of "One Tree Hill" but never a theatrically released film, earned the job based on his enthusiasm for Rand. "I was really nervous," he said. "I had no cast. No time to address anything in the script. I woke up in the morning and said, 'This is going to be the hardest thing I'll ever do. It could possibly ruin my career. But I have to attempt this.'"

The filmmakers cast the lead role of Dagny just two days before they called "action," and shot the film over a few weeks in the summer of 2010, mostly in and around L.A. at sites like Union Station and the Biltmore Hotel.

"I just wish we had more time to find the interesting nuances," Johansson said. "[Aglialoro's idea] of what movie we were making and mine at times were different. Had I been asked to direct a film that was a piece of Republican catechism I would have said no. I'm not in the business of doing political films. I'm in the business of doing good films."

Aglialoro intends to open "Atlas Shrugged: Part I" on Friday, normally tax day, with the help of Rocky Mountain Pictures, a Utah film booking service that handled the anti-evolution documentary "Expelled" and the animated religious film "The Lion of Judah."

His unorthodox distribution and marketing plans may actually work, according to one expert.

"There may be some advantages to these folks being outsiders to Hollywood," said distribution strategist Peter Broderick. "This guy wants to make sure that the message of the movie doesn't get watered down. He can control the marketing, how much is spent. If you can get enough people out from those core audiences the first weekend, it can build."

Employing a strategy similar to the one used on the breakout low-budget horror hit "Paranormal Activity," the producers have asked fans to "Demand Atlas" in their city by filling out a form on the film's website. So far the most eager city is Atlanta, with more than 3,200 requests.

O'Toole is currently working on scripts for the second movie, and — if the first does as well as its makers expect — production could start by mid-September, Kaslow said.

After years of developing scripts and paying for the production, distribution and marketing of this first film, Aglialoro estimated he will have spent more than $20 million on "Atlas Shrugged" by the time it opens. Ironically, given Rand's theories of self-interest, what Aglialoro said he really hopes the movie will do is help other people.

"I hope that by seeing the movie people will win their own competitions," Aglialoro said. "Get the best from within you, and that's how you'll make contributions."

rebecca.keegan@latimes.com

Times staff writer Ben Fritz contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Another Financial District Building Converts to Residential
By JULIE SATOW NY TIMES

JOHN STREET, a narrow sliver that runs just eight blocks from Broadway to the South Street Seaport, has been the site of a large number of the office-to-residential conversions in the financial district. Now, one of its last remaining office towers has been tapped to become a rental building.

The circa-1930 high-rise at 116 John Street, at the corner of Pearl Street, will become 418 new rental apartments that are expected to start leasing next year. Metro Loft Management, which acquired the building through a joint venture with the current owner, Hacienda Intercontinental Realty, will renovate the building in phases.

About 40 percent of the 350,000-square-foot 35-story building still has office tenants, although the developer is hoping that most of them will leave over the next six months. Some of the occupants have leases that do not expire until 2017, “but with minor incentives from us,” said Nathan Berman, a principal at Metro Loft, “most tenants are finding that now is an opportune time to seek out new office space, since the market is still soft and they can get a good deal and enter into long-term leases.” For those tenants who do not vacate, the developer will renovate around them.

Avinash K. Malhotra Architects, which was behind the nearby rental project at 2 Gold Street, will oversee the roughly $100 million renovation, which will be evenly divided among studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms, with a handful of three-bedrooms mixed in. Amenities will include full-time doormen, a concierge, a rooftop recreation area, a lounge and two gyms.

The pricing will be in line with that of other luxury rentals in the area. Jeremiah LoRusso, a managing director of New York Living Solutions, a residential brokerage that has an office at 90 John Street, says monthly rents in the area average $2,000 for a studio; $2,575 for a one-bedroom; $3,600 for a two-bedroom and upwards of $5,500 for a three-bedroom.

Along John Street, once known as Insurance Row, many of the older office buildings have been converted to rentals and condominiums over the last 15 years.

“These older Art Deco buildings outgrew their use as offices but work well as condominiums or rentals,” said Laurie A. Grasso, a partner in the law firm Herrick, Feinstein. She has worked on several conversions nearby with Metro Loft, including 20 Exchange Place, 63 Wall Street and 67 Wall Street, in addition to 116 John Street. “There are other rentals on John Street,” Ms. Grasso said, “but they were converted years ago and so don’t pose a serious competition.”

Among the rentals are 85 John Street, converted in 2001, and 100 John Street, converted in 1998. At 85 John, a studio was renting for $2,450, according to the landlord’s Web site. At 100 John, a three-bedroom was renting for $3,100, according to Streeteasy.com. Another building, 17 John Street, one of Metro Loft’s first projects, was converted in 1999. Those buildings are either fully leased or nearly so, brokers said.

The recently opened Frank Gehry-designed tower at 8 Spruce Street will add some 900 rental units to the area’s inventory. With studios starting at $2,630, “the price point is more on par with the luxury condominiums in the area than the rentals,” said Jackie Chan-Brown, a senior associate broker at CitiHabitats.

Still, Mr. Berman of Metro Loft said, “I believe that the financial district can handle several thousand more rental units without a problem, given the demand and the fact that we have a vacancy rate of below 1 percent in our portfolio of buildings.

“Considering that this area has apartments that are the least expensive in terms of price per square foot, yet offer superior transportation and all of the amenities you get in a white-glove building on the Upper East Side, I see no shortage of demand.”

A Cigarette for 75 Cents, 2 for $1: The Brisk, Shady Sale of ‘Loosies’
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN NY TIMES

By 8:30 a.m., amid the procession of sleepy-eyed office workers and addicts from the nearby methadone clinic, Lonnie Loosie plants himself in the middle of the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue in Midtown. Addressing no one in particular, he calls out his one-size-fits-all greeting: “Newports, Newports, packs and loosies.”

Rarely does a minute go by without a customer stopping just long enough to pass a dollar bill to Lonnie Loosie, known to the police by his given name, Lonnie Warner, 50. They clench the two “loosies” — as single cigarettes are called — that he thrusts back in return.

Soon Mr. Warner’s two partners, both younger men, arrive for the day and fan out along the same block. By midmorning, the block to the south is occupied by Carlton, who sells loosies, as does Carlton’s younger brother, Norman, 54.

A few blocks north, another man sells cigarettes near a check-cashing storefront. Add to these a few roving vendors who poach territory when they can.

Itinerant cigarette vendors have long been a fixture in some parts of the city, like bodegas that sell individual cigarettes in violation of state law. But with cigarette prices up and the number of smoke-friendly places down, the black market for loosies is now thriving on the streets.

The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has outlawed smoking in restaurants, bars and playgrounds, and outside hospital entrances. Even city parks, beaches and pedestrian plazas are now off limits to smokers. Then there have been successive rounds of taxes — the most recent one, a $1.60 rise in the state tax in July — that raised the price of a pack of cigarettes to $12.50 at many Midtown newsstands.

“The tax went up, and we started selling 10 times as much,” Mr. Warner said. “Bloomberg thinks he’s stopping people from smoking. He’s just turning them onto loosies.”

Mr. Warner and his partners patrol the east side of Eighth Avenue, from 35th to 36th Street. He started out on Seventh Avenue, but eventually moved a block west, in front of Staples at 35th. “You look for the crowd,” he said.

Mr. Warner said he believed that the official price was above what many people were willing or able to pay. As evidence, he noted that his customers included office workers from as far south as 32nd Street and as far north as 40th Street — people with good-paying jobs, as far as he can discern.

Mr. Warner said he bought his cigarettes — almost always Newports — for a bit over $50 a carton from smugglers who get them in states like Virginia, where the state tax is well under a dollar a pack. He then resells them for 75 cents each, two for $1 or $8 for a pack ($7 for friends).

Mr. Warner said he and each of his two partners took home $120 to $150 a day, profit made from selling about 2,000 cigarettes, mostly two at a time. Each transaction is a misdemeanor offense.

Among all of Midtown’s cigarette vendors, Mr. Warner stands out, partly because he seems to get arrested more frequently than others. That may be because his style of salesmanship is hardly furtive.

“The cops call me a fish — that’s my nickname, cause I’m easy to catch,” Mr. Warner said during a series of recent interviews. “When they need a body to arrest, they come pick me up.”

In the four years since he began selling cigarettes, Mr. Warner recalls being arrested 15 times, generally on the charge of selling untaxed tobacco. He has been arrested so often that he can recognize 10 different plainclothes police officers, he claims. The ever-present risk of arrest makes working with partners valuable — “we have six eyes on this block,” he explained.

Over many court appearances, Mr. Warner has made a favorable impression on the lawyers in Midtown Community Court, who know him as Lonnie Loosie and consider him better company than the typical misdemeanor defendant.

“There are people who are known bad guys, and then there’s him,” said Russell S. Novack, the Legal Aid lawyer who represents many of Midtown’s hustlers, prostitutes, shoplifters and public drunks. “He’s like the goodwill ambassador of Eighth Avenue. And when he comes into court, he says hello to everybody.”

For Mr. Warner, punishment usually means a few days in jail on Rikers Island, or a week of community service, some of it spent sweeping cigarette butts.

Mr. Warner asserts that the block is safer and less unruly because of him.

“We don’t allow people to sell drugs on this block,” he said. “We just don’t allow it.”

Mr. Warner grew up in Jersey City and spent about two decades in New Jersey prisons for a series of armed robberies. Those crimes date from a time when he says he was addicted to crack cocaine.

After his release from a 13-year sentence in 2006, Mr. Warner tried to find steady work in New York, but was invariably rebuffed — because of his felony status, he suspects. When he considers his options for making a living, he sees few besides selling loosies.

“I’m sorry that it’s come to this, but this is what it’s come to,” he said.

He said he would like to work someday as a barker for tour buses, selling Manhattan’s attractions to wandering tourists.

“I love the streets,” he said. “I love the people in the streets.”

In his time, Mr. Warner has learned a lot about smokers’ habits. He sometimes hears from customers who explain to him they are quitting as they buy two final loosies.

“A lot of them believe they are quitting,” he said, “but they come back every day.”

For the moment, business is good enough that Mr. Warner said he intended to buy health insurance for the first time. He currently relies on his periodic stays on Rikers Island — an occupational hazard — for medical attention. “When they screen me, I ask for all the blood tests,” he said.

Mr. Warner knows few customers by name, but dozens by face. He often tells female customers that they are too pretty to smoke, just before completing the sale. What he will not do is light a cigarette for anybody. Start offering customers a light and “you’ll have a crowd of four or five smokers around you in no time,” Mr. Warner explained. That could attract the police.

When he is on the move, as he often is, Mr. Warner walks exceptionally fast. Covering tremendous stretches of sidewalk each day keeps him fit. He is often pulled away from his Eighth Avenue post on business.

Mr. Warner carries only one or two cartons of cigarettes in his backpack, because that is the most he cares to lose should he be arrested. So each time he and his two partners run out, Mr. Warner takes the train up to Harlem, or walks a few blocks east to meet one of his half-dozen suppliers, mostly immigrants from West Africa.

There are also deliveries to make. Mr. Warner is constantly on his cellphone scheduling meetings in the lobbies of office buildings, where he will drop off a pack. “A lot of customers, especially women, don’t like coming out to the block,” he explained. “They think it’s too hot.”

At the end of the day, Mr. Warner returns to Harlem, where he often stays with his girlfriend. But even in bed, he is unable to put his day entirely behind him. His girlfriend sometimes complains, he said, that he mutters the word “Newports” again and again in his sleep.

Student fights music-sharing fine
Case is first to hit federal appeals court

A jury ordered Joel Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 for copyright violations, but a federal judge later slashed that to $67,500. 

By Milton J. Valencia BOSTON GLOBE

They arrived at the federal courthouse in Boston by the busload or joined a Facebook support group promoting the cause. If there is a legal fight that can define their generation, this is it.

Dozens of aspiring lawyers in their 20s crowded the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse yesterday to witness arguments before the First Circuit Court of Appeals in an illegal downloading and sharing lawsuit brought against a Boston University student by the music recording industry, the first case of its kind to reach the federal appellate level.

One of the lead lawyers was Jason Harrow, a student at Harvard Law School and winner of the school’s 100th annual Ames Moot Court Competition, judged by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Harrow argued that Congress never intended to punish individual consumers when passing a copyright bill more than a decade ago.

“No one thought the statue would apply to consumer users like this,’’ Harrow, 27, told the court.

At issue is how much Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum will have to pay after admitting in July 2009 to illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs on the Internet.

Tenenbaum, who attended the hearing, said he was impressed by the show of support, saying it was testimony to the importance of the case.

A federal jury awarded the Recording Industry Association of America, representing four recording companies, $675,000 under copyright laws and the Digital Theft Deterrence Act of 1999, which allowed for penalties as high as $4.5 million, or $150,000 for each song illegally and willfully downloaded and shared online. The laws required that jurors award at least $750 for each infringement.

Last year, US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner slashed the award by 90 percent to $67,500, or $2,250 a song, saying the jury’s decision was “unconstitutionally excessive.’’

The $67,500 would still serve to deter similar actions, she said.

But lawyers for Tenenbaum — Harrow and Harvard professor Charles Nesson — argued yesterday that the federal copyright laws and the Digital Theft Deterrence Act were never meant to target consumers and that, even if they were, such extreme punishment would be unconstitutional. Nesson described Tenenbaum’s knowingly downloading songs to the act of “a willful jaywalker.’’

Lawyers representing the Recording Industry Association of America argued yesterday that Congress was aware that consumers could be targeted under the deterrence act and that the penalties were set high because of the seriousness of the misconduct.

One of them said the economic impact of illegally downloading is far greater than the sharing of one song.

“It’s really the complete undermining of the copyright,’’ said Paul Clement, a former US solicitor general, representing the industry group. He argued that Tenenbaum was warned of the copyright infringement, but continued downloading songs. “He migrated from one file sharer to another after they were shut down for copyright infringement.’’

Clement also argued that a district court judge should not have altered a jury’s decision.

The three-member Court of Appeals took the matter under advisement.

Tenenbaum’s case is the first to move on to the appellate level. A Minnesota woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, faced similar allegations and is fighting the recording industry in a third trial, after verdicts were overturned and settlements turned down in two previous trials.

Most of the 30,000 lawsuits the recording industry has brought since 2003 have been settled out of court, on average for $3,000 to $5,000. In 2008, the recording industry decided it would no longer file lawsuits against individual people, but would target file sharing programs. The industry would proceed in existing cases, however.

Tenenbaum, a 27-year-old Providence native and a Boston University doctoral student in physics, has said that he had offered to settle for several thousand dollars, to no avail. He has also said that a $67,500 judgment would force him into bankruptcy. His lawyers now propose a judgment of $21, or 70 cents a song if he had bought them on iTunes.

Tenenbaum said yesterday after the hearing that he was impressed by the outpouring of support at the courthouse by people his age who have the same passion for the legal issue at stake that he has.

One striking example of the complexity of the case and the generation gap at issue, he said, was that one of the circuit judges had to ask how the file downloading and sharing programs work.

“That’s really the crux of the issue here,’’ Tenenbaum said. “That was the center of the whole argument: Was Congress even aware of file sharing’’ when it passed the deterrence act.

Nesson said yesterday that the case owes much to student interest and involvement, with law students helping to study case law, prepare briefs, and practice arguments.

“The issue that is at stake here is the future environment they live in, not just as students, but as lawyers,’’ he said.

Milton Valencia 

© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.

How Slavery Really Ended in America

By ADAM GOODHEART NY TIMES

On May 23, 1861, little more than a month into the Civil War, three young black men rowed across the James River in Virginia and claimed asylum in a Union-held citadel. Fort Monroe, Va., a fishhook-shaped spit of land near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, had been a military post since the time of the first Jamestown settlers. This spot where the slaves took refuge was also, by remarkable coincidence, the spot where slavery first took root, one summer day in 1619, when a Dutch ship landed with some 20 African captives for the fledgling Virginia Colony.

Two and half centuries later, in the first spring of the Civil War, Fort Monroe was a lonely Union redoubt in the heart of newly Confederate territory. Its defenders stood on constant guard. Frigates and armed steamers crowded the nearby waters known as Hampton Roads, one of the world’s great natural harbors. Perspiring squads of soldiers hauled giant columbiad cannons from the fort’s wharf up to its stone parapets. Yet history would come to Fort Monroe not amid the thunder of guns and the clash of fleets, but stealthily, under cover of darkness, in a stolen boat.

Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend were field hands who — like hundreds of other local slaves — had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

 

After a week or so of this, they learned some deeply unsettling news. Their master, a rebel colonel named Charles Mallory, was planning to send them even farther from home, to help build fortifications in North Carolina. That was when the three slaves decided to leave the Confederacy and try their luck, just across the water, with the Union.

 

It cannot have been an easy decision for the men. What kind of treatment would they meet with at the fort? If the federal officers sent them back, would they be punished as runaways — perhaps even as traitors? But they took their chances. Rowing toward the wharf that night in May, they hailed a guard and were admitted to the fort.

The next morning they were summoned to see the commanding general. The fugitives could not have taken this as an encouraging sign. Having lived their whole lives near the fort, they probably knew many of its peacetime officers by sight, but the man who awaited them behind a cluttered desk was someone whose face they had never seen. Worse still, as far as faces went, his was not — to put it mildly — a pleasant one. It was the face of a man whom many people, in the years ahead, would call a brute, a beast, a cold-blooded murderer. It was a face that could easily make you believe such things: a low, balding forehead, slack jowls and a tight, mean little mouth beneath a drooping mustache. It would have seemed a face of almost animal-like stupidity had it not been for the eyes. These glittered shrewdly, almost hidden amid crinkled folds of flesh. One of them had an odd sideways cast, as if its owner were always considering something else besides the thing in front of him. These were the eyes that now surveyed Baker, Mallory and Townsend.

The general began asking them questions: Who was their master? Was he a rebel or a Union man? Were they field hands or house servants? Did they have families? Why had they run away? Could they tell him anything about the Confederate fortifications they had been working on? Their response to this last question — that the battery was still far from completion — seemed to please him. At last he dismissed the three brusquely, offering no indication of their fate.

Maj. Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler arrived at the fort only a day ahead of the fugitive slaves, greeted at the esplanade by a 13-gun salute. That morning, Butler sat down to compose an important initial report. When an adjutant interrupted to inform him of the fugitives, Butler set down his pen. The War Department could wait. The three ragged black men waiting outside were a more pressing matter.

Butler was no abolitionist, but the three slaves presented a problem. True, the laws of the United States were clear: all fugitives must be returned to their masters. The founding fathers enshrined this in the Constitution; Congress reinforced it in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act; and it was still the law of the land — including, as far as the federal government was concerned, within the so-called Confederate states. The war had done nothing to change it. Most important, noninterference with slavery was the very cornerstone of the Union’s war policy. President Abraham Lincoln had begun his inaugural address by making this clear, pointedly and repeatedly. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” the president said. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

Yet to Fort Monroe’s new commander, the fugitives who turned up at his own front gate seemed like a novel case. The enemy had been deploying them to construct a battery aimed directly at his fort — and no doubt would put them straight back to work if recaptured, with time off only for a sound beating. They had just offered him some highly useful military intelligence. And Virginia, as of 12 or so hours ago, was officially in rebellion against the federal government, having just ratified the secession ordinance passed a month before. Butler had not invited the fugitives in or engineered their escape, but here they were, literally at his doorstep: a conundrum with political and military implications, at the very least. He could not have known — not yet — that his response that day might change the course of the national drama that was then just beginning. Yet it was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that an unanticipated bureaucratic dilemma would force the hand of history.

Despite his rank, General Butler had been a professional soldier barely four weeks. In private life, back in Massachusetts, he was a lawyer, and a very successful one — although he grew up poor, the swamp Yankee son of a widow who kept a boardinghouse in Lowell, the textile-mill town. Unable to attract clients through social connections or charm, he became an expert quibbler: a man who knew every loose thread in the great tangled skein of common law and who could unravel an opponent’s entire case with the gentlest of tugs. By his early 40s, he had also built a successful career as a state legislator and harbored larger political ambitions.

A fellow officer once called Butler “less like a major general than like a politician who is coaxing for votes.” Race-baiting was red meat to many of his working-class constituents in Lowell, and he had always been glad to toss morsels in their direction. But after barely 24 hours at Fort Monroe, the new commander had already sized up his new constituency. The garrison was made up predominantly of eager volunteers from New England, many with antislavery sympathies. How was Butler to win the confidence — or even obedience — of such men if his first act as their commander was to send three poor blacks back into bondage?

Butler’s features may have been brutish and his manners coarse, but inwardly, he nursed the outsize vanity of certain physically ugly men — vanity often manifest in a craving for approval and adulation. He also possessed a sympathetic, even occasionally sentimental, heart.

Still . . . sentiment was a fine thing; so was the admiration of one’s subordinates. Ultimately, though, his duty was to his commander in chief. With a few strokes of his pen, Lincoln had made Butler a major general; the president could just as easily unmake him, sending him back to Lowell in disgrace — and with another stroke, for that matter, send the blacks back to their master as slaves.

Whatever Butler’s decision on the three fugitives’ fate, he would have to reach it quickly. He had barely picked up his pen to finally begin that report before an adjutant interrupted with another message: a rebel officer, under flag of truce, had approached the causeway of Fort Monroe. The Virginians wanted their slaves back.

Waiting before the front gate was a man on horseback: Maj. John Baytop Cary of the 115th. With his silver gray whiskers and haughtily tilted chin, he appeared every inch the Southern cavalier.

Butler, also on horseback, went out to meet him. The men rode, side by side, off federal property and into rebel Virginia. They must have seemed an odd pair: the dumpy Yankee, unaccustomed to the saddle, slouching along like a sack of potatoes; the trim, upright Virginian, in perfect control of himself and his mount.

Cary got down to business. “I am informed,” he said, “that three Negroes belonging to Colonel Mallory have escaped within your lines. I am Colonel Mallory’s agent and have charge of his property. What do you mean to do with those Negroes?”

“I intend to hold them,” Butler said.

“Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”

Even the dour Butler must have found it hard to suppress a smile. This was, of course, a question he had expected. And he had prepared what he thought was a fairly clever answer.

“I mean to take Virginia at her word,” he said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”

“But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot consistently detain the Negroes.”

“But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”

Ever the diligent litigator, Butler had been reading up on his military law. In time of war, he knew, a commander had a right to seize any enemy property that was being used for hostile purposes. The three fugitive slaves, before their escape, were helping build a Confederate gun emplacement. Very well, then — if the Southerners insisted on treating blacks as property, this Yankee lawyer would treat them as property, too. Legally speaking, he had as much justification to confiscate Baker, Mallory and Townsend as to intercept a shipment of muskets or swords.

Cary, frustrated, rode back to the Confederate lines. Butler, for his part, returned to Fort Monroe feeling rather pleased with himself. Still, he knew that vanquishing the rebel officer was only a minor victory, and perhaps a momentary one if his superiors in Washington frowned on what he had done.

The following day, a Saturday, Butler picked up his pen and resumed his twice-interrupted dispatch to Washington. Certain questions had arisen, he began, “of very considerable importance both in a military and political aspect, and which I beg leave to herewith submit.”

But before this missive reached its destination, matters would become even more complicated. On Sunday morning, eight more fugitives turned up at Union lines outside the fort. On Monday, there were 47 — and not just young men now, but women, old people, entire families. There was a mother with a 3-month-old infant in her arms. There was an aged slave who had been born in the year of America’s independence.

By Wednesday, a Massachusetts soldier would write home: “Slaves are brought in here hourly.”

“What’s to Be Done With the Blacks?” asked a headline in The Chicago Tribune. That was the question now facing the Lincoln administration. Within days after the three fugitive slaves crossed the river, their exploits — and their fate — were being discussed throughout the nation. At first the newspapers played it more or less as a comic sketch in a minstrel show: a Yankee shyster outwits a drawling Southern aristocrat. But Lincoln saw things in a more serious light. The president realized he might now be forced to make a signal verdict about matters he previously tried to avoid: slavery, race and emancipation.

Lincoln and his cabinet gathered to address Butler’s decision — and ended up punting. While reminding Butler that “the business you are sent upon . . . is war, not emancipation,” they left the general to decide what to do with fugitive slaves — including whether or not to continue declaring them contraband of war. Unfortunately, no detailed account of the deliberations survives. But a letter from one cabinet secretary, Montgomery Blair, suggests they were driven by a motive as common in Washington then as it is now: “a desire to escape responsibility for acting at all at this time.” By that point, the administration had already received a second dispatch from Butler, describing the influx of women and children. With this in mind, Blair — a member of a slaveholding Maryland family — suggested one pragmatic “modification” to Butler’s policy. “You can . . . take your pick of the lot and let the rest go so as not to be required to feed unproductive laborers or indeed any that you do not require,” he urged. As to the slaves’ eventual fate, Blair wrote, of course no one was suggesting that they be set free. Perhaps at the end of the war, those who belonged to men convicted of treason could be legally confiscated and sent off to Haiti or Central America. (The New York Herald, meanwhile, proposed that the federal government should wait until the war ended and sell all the slaves back to their owners, at half-price, to finance its cost.)

Yet Butler realized what Blair did not: events were unfolding far too quickly for any of that. Despite the counsels from Washington, Butler was not turning away “unproductive” fugitives. He replied: “If I take the able-bodied only, the young must die. If I take the mother, must I not take the child?” By early June, some 500 fugitives were within the Union lines at Fort Monroe.

“Stampede Among the Negroes in Virginia,” proclaimed Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, with a double-page spread of dramatic woodcuts showing black men, women and children crossing a creek under a full moon, then being welcomed heartily into the fort by General Butler himself (or rather, by the artist’s trimmer, handsomer version of him). One correspondent estimated that “this species of property under Gen. Butler’s protection [is] worth $500,000, at a fair average of $1,000 apiece in the Southern human flesh market.”

Journalists throughout the Union quipped relentlessly about the “shipments of contraband goods” or, in the words of The Times, “contraband property having legs to run away with, and intelligence to guide its flight” — until, within a week or two after Butler’s initial decision, the fugitives had a new name: contrabands. It was a perfectly composed bit of slang, a minor triumph of Yankee ingenuity.

Were these blacks people or property? Free or slave? Such questions were, as yet, unanswerable — for answering them would have raised a host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address. Contrabands let the speaker or writer off the hook by letting the escapees be all those things at once. “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,” one Union officer wrote. Within a few weeks, the average Northern newspaper reader could scan, without blinking, a sentence like this one: “Several contrabands came into the camp of the First Connecticut Regiment today.”

As routine as the usage soon became, however, a hint of Butler’s joke remained, a slight edge of nervous laughter. A touch of racist derision, too: William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, carped, justly enough, that it was offensive to speak of human beings that way. Yet in its very absurdity, reflecting the Alice-in-Wonderland legal reasoning behind Butler’s decision, the term also mocked the absurdity of slavery — and the willful stupidity of federal laws that, for nearly a century, had acknowledged no meaningful difference between a bushel of corn and a human being with dark skin. Eventually, even black leaders adopted it.

Back at Monroe — dubbed “the freedom fort” — fugitives continued arriving daily. Each morning, dozens lined up to pitch in with manual labor. Soon they seemed almost like members of the garrison. A Times correspondent wrote: “Their shovels and their other implements of labor, they handle and carry as soldiers do their guns. . . . I have no doubt they would make fair or even excellent soldiers.” Moreover, as the garrison’s medical chief remarked, “they are the pleasantest faces to be seen at the post.”

Many of the Union soldiers had never really spoken with a black person before; the Vermont farmboys had perhaps never even seen one before leaving home. Now they were conversing with actual men and women who had been (and perhaps still were) slaves: people who had previously figured only as a political abstraction. Some fugitives shared horrific accounts; one man described “bucking,” a practice in which a slave, before being beaten, had his wrists and ankles tied and slipped over a wooden stake. Almost all spoke of loved ones sold away; the most chilling thing was that they said it matter-of-factly, as if their wives or children had simply died.

Perhaps most surprising of all — for Northerners accustomed to Southern tales of contentedly dependent slaves — was this, in the words of one soldier: “There is a universal desire among the slaves to be free. . . . Even old men and women, with crooked backs, who could hardly walk or see, shared the same feeling.”

General Butler grew ever more adamant in the defense of “his” contrabands, to a degree that must have shocked his old associates. By July, he began pressing the Lincoln administration to admit that the contrabands were not really contraband: that they had become free. Indeed, that they were — in a legal sense — no longer things but people: “Have they not by their master’s acts, and the state of war, assumed the condition, which we hold to be the normal one, of those made in God’s image? . . . I confess that my own mind is compelled by this reasoning to look upon them as men and women.”

It would take another 14 months — and tens of thousands more Union casualties — before the Lincoln administration was ready to endorse such a view.

“Shall we now end the war and not eradicate the cause?” the general wrote to a friend in August. “Will not God demand this of us now [that] he has taken away all excuse for not pursuing the right?” (During the rest of the war, Butler’s support for black civil rights — and harsh treatment of rebel sympathizers — made him hated throughout most of the South, where he won the nickname Beast Butler.)

More and more people had begun to share Butler’s conviction that the fugitives at Monroe stood in the vanguard of a larger revolution. “I have watched them with deep interest, as they filed off to their work, or labored steadily through the long, hot day,” a Northern visitor to the fort wrote. “Somehow there was to my eye a weird, solemn aspect to them, as they walked slowly along, as if they, the victims, had become the judges in this awful contest, or as if they were . . . spinning, unknown to all, the destinies of the great Republic.”

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.”

The Iron Curtain did not unravel at that moment, but that night the possibility of cautious, incremental change ceased to exist, if it had ever really existed at all. The wall fell because of those thousands of pressing bodies, and because of that border guard’s shrug.

In the very first months of the Civil War — after Baker, Mallory and Townsend breached their own wall, and Butler shrugged — slavery’s iron curtain began falling all across the South. Lincoln’s secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay, in their biography of the president, would say of the three slaves’ escape, “Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war.”

Within weeks after the first contrabands’ arrival at Fort Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines just about anywhere there were Union lines: in Northern Virginia, on the Mississippi, in Florida. It is unclear how many of these escapees knew of Butler’s decision, but probably quite a few did. Edward Pierce, a Union soldier who worked closely with the contrabands, marveled at “the mysterious spiritual telegraph which runs through the slave population,” though he most likely exaggerated just a bit when he continued, “Proclaim an edict of emancipation in the hearing of a single slave on the Potomac, and in a few days it will be known by his brethren on the gulf.”

In August, Lincoln’s War Department tried to bring some clarity to the chaos by asking Union commanders to collect detailed information on each fugitive: not just name and physical description but “the name and the character, as loyal or disloyal, of the master” — since whether the master supported the Union or the Confederacy was, of course, essential to determining whether the particular man or woman counted as legitimate contraband. Such a system would let the federal government assure slaveholders that their “rights” were protected, and possibly return the slaves to their proper owners once the rebel states had rejoined the Union.

But how were officers supposed to tell whether a master they had never laid eyes on was loyal or disloyal — even assuming that the slave was telling the truth in identifying him? Besides, didn’t the military have more pressing business at the moment, like fighting the war? The new contraband doctrine was utterly unenforceable almost from the moment it was devised, but it became hugely influential precisely because it was so unenforceable: it did not open the floodgates in theory, but it did so in practice.

And it did so with very little political risk to the Lincoln administration. Indeed, preposterous as the contraband doctrine was as a piece of law, it was also — albeit inadvertently — a masterstroke of politics; indeed, it satisfied nearly every potential theoretical and political objection while being completely unworkable in the long run. “There is often great virtue in such technical phrases in shaping public opinion,” Pierce observed. “The venerable gentleman, who wears gold spectacles and reads a conservative daily, prefers confiscation to emancipation. He is reluctant to have slaves declared freemen but has no objection to their being declared contrabands.”

The system was eminently practical in other terms. Regiments needed labor: extra hands to cook meals, wash clothes and dig latrines. When black men and women were willing to do these things, whites were happy not to ask inconvenient questions — not the first or the last time that the allure of cheap labor would trump political principles in America.

Blacks were contributing to the Union cause in larger ways. Not just at Fort Monroe but also throughout the South they provided Northerners with valuable intelligence and expert guidance. When Lincoln’s master spy, Allan Pinkerton, traveled undercover through the Confederacy, he wrote, “My best source of information was the colored men. . . . I mingled freely with them, and found them ever ready to answer questions and to furnish me with every fact which I desired to possess.” They were often the only friends the Yankees encountered as they groped their way anxiously through hostile territory.

Just as influential was what did not happen: the terrible moment — long feared among whites — when slaves would rise up and slaughter their masters. It soon became apparent from the behavior of the contrabands that the vast majority of slaves did not want vengeance: they simply wanted to be free and to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as other Americans. Many were even ready to share in the hardships and dangers of the war. Millions of white Americans realized they did not actually have to fear a bloodbath if the slaves were suddenly set free. This awareness in itself was a revolution.

Most important, though, was the revolution in the minds of the slaves themselves. Within little more than a year, the stream of a few hundred contrabands at Fort Monroe became a river of tens — probably even hundreds — of thousands. They “flocked in vast numbers — an army in themselves — to the camps of the Yankees,” a Union chaplain wrote. “The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities.”

When Lincoln finally unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862, he framed it in Butleresque terms, not as a humanitarian gesture but as a stratagem of war.On the September day of Lincoln’s edict, a Union colonel ran into William Seward, the president’s canny secretary of state, on the street in Washington and took the opportunity to congratulate him on the administration’s epochal act.

Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let off a puff of wind over an accomplished fact.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the officer asked.

“I mean,” the secretary replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.”

This article is adapted from “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” by Adam Goodheart (agoodheart2@washcoll.edu), published by Knopf this month. Mr. Goodheart is the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” from which his article in this issue is adapted. He is director of Washington College’s C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and contributes frequently to The Times’s online Civil War series, “Disunion.” Editor: Sheila Glaser (s.glaser-MagGroup@nytimes.com).