The Strangers' Tomb

An enslaved woman in South Carolina is stripped and photographed. A night watchman in Cambridge is assaulted. An extra corpse turns up in a tomb. How are they connectedand who's next?

Cambridge, Mass., FebruaryApril 1858. Civil war looms in the United States as scientific frontiers are rapidly expanding across the globe. Harvard botanist Asa Gray is discerning odd patterns among his new botanical specimens. Gray's findings set him at odds with Louis Agassiz, the most celebrated man in American science, who believes that the races of humankind represent separate speciesa popular notion in the slave-owning South. Gray, in contrast, fervently supports Charles Darwin (whose On the Origin of Species will be published the following year) in believing all humans are variants of one species. The conflict is particularly acute because in Gray's employ is Darius Jacobs, a fugitive slave. Gray and Jacobs expect the worst when Cambridge anticipates a visit from...