Edward Kinsley, a flinty Massachusetts abolitionist. Kinsley was thirty-three years old, stout, with a broad face, a wide-set mouth, a high forehead, and untamed sideburns. He had helped raise money to form volunteer military units of free blacks in the North. But because there were only enough free blacks there to form two small regiments, Massachusetts governor John Albion Andrew had enlisted Kinsley, a lifelong friend, to travel to North Carolina to raise a larger black regiment composed of fugitive slaves. Both men sought to answer a question that would help shape the course of the war:
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