By Peter X. Accardo, Scholarly and Public Programs Librarian Born into slavery in 1840, William Harvey Carney and his family left Virginia sometime in the 1850s before settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an active hub on the Underground Railroad and the same town where Frederick Douglass had brought his own family in 1838 at the … Continue reading How Sergeant William Harvey Carney Rescued the Old Flag in the Assault on Fort Wagner in the American Civil War