Review by New York Times Review
the civil war began over one basic issue : Was slavery, the ownership of human beings, a legitimate national institution, fixed in national law by the United States Constitution? One half of the country said it was, the other said it was not. The ensuing conflict was the chief instigator of Southern secession, as the secessionists themselves proclaimed. It was thus the chief source of the war that led to slavery's abolition in the United States. The struggle over property in slaves focused largely on the fate of the Western territories, but it also inflamed conflicts over the status of fugitive slaves. Pro-slavery Southerners insisted that the federal government was obliged to capture slaves who had escaped to free states and return them to their masters, and thus vindicate the masters' absolute property rights in humans. Antislavery Northerners, denying that obligation and those supposed rights, saw the fugitives as heroic refugees from bondage, and resisted federal interference fiercely and sometimes violently. Even more than the fights over the territories, Andrew Delbanco asserts in "The War Before the War," the "dispute over fugitive slaves ... launched the final acceleration of sectional estrangement." Delbanco, an eminent and prolific scholar of American literature, is well suited to recounting this history, and not just because fugitive slaves have been a subject of American fiction from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison and beyond. A traditional critic in the historicist mode, Delbanco has always thoughtfully rendered the contexts in which his writers wrote. He has offered fresh interpretations not only of how national politics shaped the writing of, say, "Moby-Dick," but also of what Melville's tragic awareness and moral ambiguities tell us about the temper of a nation hurtling toward civil war. Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, as well as Melville, Stowe and numerous lesser artists and thinkers of the time, all had pertinent if sometimes cursory and not always pleasing things to say about fugitive slaves. Delbanco's incisive analyses of their observations - and, just as important, of their failure to observe - form one of his book's running themes. Delbanco's skills as a literary critic also illuminate the contributions fugitive slaves made to the growing antislavery movement. Although the number of fugitives was relatively small - according to an 1850 survey, only about 1,000 per year reached the North - they disproportionally aggravated the sectional divide. In part, Delbanco argues, the runaways were a continuing symbolic insult to the slaveholders' honor, as their flight contradicted Southern claims that slavery was a benevolent, paternalist institution. (He might have added that the fugitive slave issue became an effective and distracting wedge for pro-slavery extremists, who deployed it to appeal to conservative Northerners by provoking antislavery radicals to violent paroxysms while playing the victim themselves.) More important, scores of fugitive slaves either wrote or dictated their personal experiences in widely read narratives, most famously the "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," which awakened Northern whites to the enormity of Southern slavery. To his credit, Delbanco does not inflate the literary merits of the slave narratives. Often filtered through the sensibilities of collaborating abolitionists, they amounted, Delbanco writes, to "more than propaganda and less than literature." (Douglass's narrative was an exception and two or three others were at least partial exceptions.) But there is no denying the sensation they caused amid the political emergencies of the 1840s and 1850s, "giving voice to people long silenced," and assailing the pro-slavery propaganda that sustained Northern white complacency. Delbanco's literary judgments aside, "The War Before the War" is mainly a straightforward account of events that, although familiar to professional historians, ought to be known by anyone who claims to know anything about American history. In 1787, Southern delegates to the federal Constitutional Convention obtained a fugitive slave clause that called for (albeit vaguely) the capture and return of successful runaways. Over the following six decades, persistent slave escapes tested the ramshackle machinery put in place to halt them. In time, alarmed but emboldened Northern free blacks and their white abolitionist allies formed vigilance committees to ward off slavecatchers, while Northern legislatures began approving socalled personal liberty laws to shield the fugitives. in 1850, responding to slaveholders' outcries, Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act that strengthened the federal mandate for arresting and returning escapees. In a series of shocking confrontations, antislavery Northerners intervened, either to prevent the capture of fugitives or liberate those already in custody. The uproar of these pitched battles - Delbanco's war before the war - helped turn Northern moderates into abolitionists and temperate Southerners into fire-eaters; at its height in 1854, it prompted President Franklin Pierce to order 1,500 federal troops to escort a single fugitive in Boston named Anthony Burns back into slavery in Virginia. Enforcing the fugitive slave law put the federal government emphatically on the side of slavery over freedom, which hastened the collapse of the national political system, the rise of the antislavery Republican Party and the coming of the war. Delbanco aims to balance his antislavery allegiances with caution about the smugness that can come with historical hindsight. In some of his earlier writings, this wariness has led him, by my taste, to be a little too charitable to revisionist interpretations that present the Civil War as a product of political failure, a catastrophe, instigated by malcontents, that a more responsible national leadership could have prevented. This view has arisen from an admixture of pacifism and an insistence on diminishing the moral as well as political disaster of slavery; and it has sometimes led its advocates to demonize the abolitionists as the chief fomenters of an unnecessary war. As Delbanco admires the abolitionists, and slights slavery's terrors not at all, his occasional revisionist musings seem to stem from his horror at the military slaughterhouse, his wonder at whether it could have been avoided and his wariness of sanctimony, including Yankee sanctimony. In this book, though, Delbanco sticks to viewing the war as the ghastly but necessary price for abolishing slavery - what Abraham Lincoln described in his Second Inaugural Address as cruel justice meted out by the Almighty. Delbanco now dispels sanctimony differently, by reviving forgotten figures such as the St. Louis minister and educator William Greenleaf Eliot - not coincidentally, T. S. Eliot's grandfather - who hated slavery but tolerated the fugitive slave law and, until the bitter end, held out hopes for a conciliatory gradual emancipation. History usually plows such people under as equivocators and worse. Delbanco restores to them their moral seriousness in brutally uncertain times. Over all, Delbanco's account is accurate as well as vivid (although I wish he hadn't garbled the details of the adoption of the fugitive slave clause in 1787, the book's most serious lapse). He makes a strong case for the centrality of the fugitive slaves to the sectional crisis; indeed, by emphasizing the symbolism of the issue, he may have slighted the importance of its political and legal aspects. Without question, he has once again written a valuable book, reflective as well as jarring, concerning the most violent and enduring conflict in American history. Antislavery Northerners saw fugitives as heroic refugees from bondage. SEAN wilentz teaches at Princeton. His latest book, "No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding," was published in September.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Distinguished professor of American Studies at Columbia Delbanco (The Abolitionist Imagination , 2012) examines the untenable paradox of America's founding on democracy and liberty and dependence on slavery through the stories of those who resisted enslavement by attempting to escape. Delbanco traces the crafting of and attempts to enforce Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution, known as the fugitive slave clause, which criminalized the sheltering of fugitive slaves and called on local authorities to help return them to slavers. This meant that even free black people in the North including those who had never been enslaved found their lives infused with terror of being seized and deported. In 1853, the story of a free black New Yorker kidnapped in 1841 in Washington, D.C., was published as Twelve Years a Slave, one of a number of narratives by individuals who tried to escape slavery that Delbanco discusses. His history also covers court battles and the support of abolitionist sympathizers. Delbanco provides a fresh and illuminating look at those who held fast to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in unspeakably oppressive and brutal times.--Grace Jackson-Brown Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Delbanco, an American studies professor at Columbia University, follows up 2012's The Abolitionist Imagination with a more in-depth look at the divisive effects of slavery on America. He argues that the problem of "fugitive slaves"-the Constitution included a clause establishing the rights of slave holders to recover escaped slaves-brought slavery into sharp relief, contributing to the inevitability of the Civil War. He writes that well-publicized recaptures of escaped enslaved people kept the evils of slavery front and center for Northerners (who, he points out, were often as racist as Southerners though they opposed slavery), and Northern efforts to block the return of the South's most valuable properties kept slavery at the forefront of Southern consciousness. Delbanco's strength is in making accessible to modern readers the arguments of the Southern advocates for slavery and Northern abolitionists. He examines court cases, including the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring that no slave had "rights which the white man was bound to respect"; books, including Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the political and legislative strategies of both Northern and Southern leaders (insightfully drawing parallels to 21st-century political rhetoric). This well-documented and valuable work makes clear how slavery shaped the early American experience with effects that reverberate today. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, William Morris Endeavor. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Delbanco's (American studies, Columbia Univ.; Melville) superb book tells the story of how the amalgamated country fractured between free and proslavery states. He concedes that there were multiple reasons, but one stands out as proof that the "united" states concept was a falsehood from the start: that enslaved bondsmen repeatedly fled their masters in search of freedom in the North. In the process, they described the evils of slavery to Northerners, all the while enraging Southerners who called for the return of their slaves. The author wins his point by showing that a growing number of Americans began to acknowledge that the nation was little more than a prison in which million of people had no rights at all. Delbanco demonstrates how a mushrooming tide of runaways incited conflict well before the Civil War. Several salient points of interest in his study include Lincoln's equivocation on the retention or abolishment of the Fugitive Slave Act as well as the war's bloody effect in driving the courses of union and emancipation toward convergence. VERDICT A paramount contribution to U.S. middle period historiography. Also recommended for both scholars and general readers of African American, Constitutional, and diplomatic history. [Prepub Alert, 5/21/18.]-John Carver Edwards, formerly with Univ. of Georgia Libs. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Provocative, sweeping study of America's original sinslaveryin the late 18th and early 19th centuries.In January 1850, writes Delbanco (American Studies/Columbia Univ.; The Abolitionist Imagination, 2012, etc.) early on in this book, a Virginia senator named James Mason introduced what would become the Fugitive Slave Act, justifying the law constitutionally. "From the point of view of its proponents," writes the author, "it was a new attempt to solve an old problem: slavery is a condition from which the enslaved will seek to escape." Slaves fled from George Washington's farms after the Revolution, and they fled in uncountable numbers in the years after that. Writes Delbanco, 1851 would see a record number of slaves being captured under the terms of the new law, which obliged nonslaveholding states to participate in the return of escapees to bondage; a handful of that number were freed, but most were returned either judicially or without due process. "Opponents regarded compliant officials with disgust and treated them with derision," writes the author, but even so, efforts to help slaves freeing captivity were improvisational, such as the Underground Railroad, "a loose confederation of independent cells of which the membership was sometimes a single person making a snap decision to hide a runaway rather than turn him in." Meanwhile, South and North struggled to expand or contain slavery in the new territories of the West, contributing to the conditions leading to secession and war. The overarching point of Delbanco's narrative is the legal complicity of various federal institutions, from the first constitutional conventions to laws passed just before and even during the Civil War. As the author observes, Lincoln seemed torn about how to dismantle slavery legally in the months leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation; it wasn't until June 1864, in a "belated act of formal recognition of what the war had already accomplished," that Congress repealed the Fugitive Slave Act.Essential background reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the early republic and the Civil War. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
