The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

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.)