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

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.