A New York Times Notable Book Selection
Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Winner of the Lionel Trilling Book Award
A New York Times Critics' Best Book
"Excellent... stunning."-Ta-Nehisi Coates
This book tells the story of America's original sin-slavery-through politics, law, literature, and above all, through the eyes of enslavedblack people who risked their lives to flee from bondage, thereby forcing the nation to confront the truth about itself. The struggle over slavery divided not only the American nation but also the hearts and minds of individual citizens faced with the timeless problem of when to submit to unjust laws and when to resist. The War Before the War illuminates what brought us to war with ourselves and the terrible legacies of slavery that are with us still.
A New York Times Notable Book Selection
Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Winner of the Lionel Trilling Book Award
A New York Times Critics' Best Book
"Excellent... stunning."-Ta-Nehisi Coates
This book tells the story of America's original sin-slavery-through politics, law, literature, and above all, through the eyes of enslavedblack people who risked their lives to flee from bondage, thereby forcing the nation to confront the truth about itself. The struggle over slavery divided not only the American nation but also the hearts and minds of individual citizens faced with the timeless problem of when to submit to unjust laws and when to resist. The War Before the War illuminates what brought us to war with ourselves and the terrible legacies of slavery that are with us still.
Andrew Delbanco is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University. Author of many notable books, including College, Melville, The Death of Satan, Required Reading, The Real American Dream, and The Puritan Ordeal, he was recently appointed president of the Teagle Foundation, which supports liberal education for college students of all backgrounds. Winner of the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates, he is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2001, Andrew Delbanco was named by Time as "America's Best Social Critic." In 2012, President Barack Obama presented him with the National Humanities Medal.
“[A] sweeping and fascinating book . . . a long, festering story of
political disunion, mapped through many voices. . . . Delbanco
writes lyrically . . . and with a genuine sense of tragedy . . .
The War Before the War presents a clear narrative of the legal and
political history of [how], self-tortured by the slavery question,
a ‘nation’ descended into disunion.” —David Blight, New York Review
of Books
“A valuable book, reflective as well as jarring . . . Delbanco, an
eminent and prolific scholar of American literature, is well suited
to recounting . . . the most violent and enduring conflict in
American history.” —Sean Wilentz, New York Times Book Review
“Delbanco . . . excavates the past in ways that illuminate the
present. He lucidly shows [how] in the name of avoiding conflict .
. . the nation was brought to the brink and into the breach. This
is a story about compromises—and a riveting, unsettling one at
that.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"Sweeping . . . stirring . . . Delbanco relates many thrilling
escape-and-rescue episodes. . . . Well worth reading . . . for
those interested in exploring the roots of today's social problems
and learning about early efforts to resolve them.” —David
Reynolds, Wall Street Journal
“Delbanco has written a compelling new synthesis about the
cultural, social, and political ruptures around fugitivism leading
up to the war. Moreover, Delbanco’s skills as a literature scholar
give his work an advantage over other historians, integrating
effective literary analysis into this political history . . . The
War before the War will be particularly impactful because it
grapples with literary, social, and political history, making it a
useful new history of slavery and the sectional crisis.” —Early
American Literature
“A compelling, elegantly written account of how fugitive slave laws
laid bare ‘the moral crisis’ in the hearts and minds of antebellum
Americans.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“In The War Before the War, Andrew Delbanco narrates this history
in lucid prose and with a moral clarity that is best described as
terrifying . . . One of the most admirable features of this
truly great book is the subtlety with which Delbanco considers his
story’s applicability to our own moment.” —Alan Jacobs, The
Weekly Standard
“Many present-day historians dealing with issues of race and
slavery tend to approach the past as prosecuting attorneys eager to
bring all those culprits in the past to justice. They indict some
in the antebellum period for their timidity and caution because
they feared a war and did not know what to do, and applaud others
who turned out to guess right about the course of events. Delbanco
has too subtle a sensibility, too fine an appreciation of the
tragedy of life, for that crude kind of history writing. Although
he describes the brutality of slavery with force and clarity, and
his feelings about slavery are never in doubt, he nevertheless
displays a compassion for all the people, slaveholders included,
caught up in circumstances they could scarcely control or even
fully comprehend.” —Gordon Wood, The New Republic
“[Delbanco] has performed a remarkable service in producing this
deeply researched and heavily documented book. His literary style
is flowing and graceful, well-balanced . . . This is truly an
important book, and well-worth the time and effort to educate
oneself in the source of a human tragedy whose far-reaching fingers
still scratch upon our conscience.” —Richard Raymond, The Roanoke
Times
“Cogently argued, meticulously researched, and compulsively
readable, The War Before the War sheds new light not only on
American history, but on America’s present story, and its struggles
with race.” —Read it Forward
“Andrew Delbanco’s latest book, The War Before the War: Fugitive
Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to
the Civil War, is a richly detailed, thought-provoking and
compelling chronicle of the role fugitive slaves played in widening
the gap between America’s two distinct societies . . . Andrew
Delbanco, who is a Columbia University professor, has written an
engaging and most valuable account of America’s original sin.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Provocative, sweeping study of America's original sin—slavery—in
the late 18th and early 19th centuries . . . Essential background
reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the early
republic and the Civil War.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Superb . . . A paramount contribution to the U.S. middle period
historiography.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“This well-documented and valuable work makes clear how slavery
shaped the early American experience with effects that reverberate
today.” —Publishers Weekly
“Andrew Delbanco is one of our generation’s most gifted scholars
and discerning, public intellectuals. In his astonishing new work,
The War Before the War, he transforms the figure of the fugitive
slave from the margins of American history to its dynamic center,
demonstrating how their plight exposed the paradoxes in the soul of
a nation torn between freedom and slavery, as it propelled to its
greatest reckoning. By rendering in such gripping detail that
defining struggle of the 18th and 19th centuries, Delbanco reminds
us of the stakes of moral testing in every generation, and how the
agents of moral change often begin their journeys under the most
desperate circumstances. The result is not only a brilliant
historical analysis; it is also a source of strength for the road
ahead—a long, hard road that stretches back to the founding of our
great Republic. This delightfully readable book is thronged with
stories of heroes whose names may escape us, but whose flights from
bondage helped to revolutionize the country we are called upon to
defend today.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins
Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard and
author of The Black Church
“The great value of Andrew Delbanco's interpretively edifying The
War Before the War is in centering the cause of the great
irrepressible conflict of 1860 in the many hearts-and-minds of
otherwise indifferent, sympathetic, uncertain northern men and
women who finally found enforced complicity in the South's
'peculiar institution' intolerable and a war for human ideals
inescapable.” —David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography
“In The War Before the War, one of America’s most eloquent scholars
draws readers into the compelling story of how the North-South
struggle over runaway slaves prepared the way for the Civil War.
From the making of the Constitution to the bloodbath that began at
Fort Sumter, Andrew Delbanco captures the experience of escaped
slaves as they forced white Americans to confront the cruelties of
slavery. This is a political, legal, and above all, human, story
with powerful resonance today.” —Dan Carter, author of Scottsboro:
A Tragedy of the American South
“Timely, incisive, deeply researched, The War Before the War tells
the vital story of fugitive slaves, whose courageous defiance
forced the young nation to reckon with its primal horror.
Delbanco’s swift-moving yet powerfully nuanced narrative offers
insights into the institution of slavery and the political
maneuvering that led up to the Civil War. This book is essential
reading today, at a historical moment that demands unflinching
reflection on founding truths.” —Elizabeth D. Samet, author of
Soldier’s Heart and editor of the Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S.
Grant
“The War Before the War is a beautifully researched work of
scholarship and one of the best examinations of the bleak, complex,
macabre world of American slavery that I've read. Everything about
the Peculiar Institution is here in vivid detail, but especially
the crisis caused by a Fugitive Slave Act that tore this nation
asunder. And if that were not enough, Andrew Delbanco makes us
aware of how the past is painfully present today in our social,
racial and political dilemmas that "rhyme" with those of our
nineteenth century predecessors. This is a work every American
needs to read.” —Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winning
author of Middle Passage
“With a rare combination of in-depth historical research and an
unmatched command of nineteenth-century American literature, Andrew
Delbanco tells the story of the coming of the Civil War and
emancipation. He highlights the role of fugitive slaves in
forcing the slavery issue onto the centerstage of politics, but
manages to treat all the protagonists in the long struggle over
human bondage with compassion and insight. The result is an
original rendering of the nation's greatest crisis.” —Eric Foner,
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and
Pulitzer Prize Winning author of Reconstruction and The Fiery
Trial
“Wherever slavery existed, so did runaway slaves. Now Andrew
Delbanco places those fugitives—and the laws that tried to stop
them—at the center of the coming of the Civil War. In this
surprising and dramatic history, we follow courageous slaves,
outraged masters, righteous and self-righteous politicians, and
agonized citizens, as they collide with the Constitution of the
United States. Taking us to barbarous plantations and bustling city
streets, into raucous courtrooms and the restive halls of Congress,
Delbanco brilliantly reveals parallels with the humanitarian crises
and cultural clashes of our own times.” —Martha Hodes, author of
Mourning Lincoln
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