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

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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   “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   “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”—New York Times Book Review  "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"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.” — Publisher’s 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 Stony the Road  “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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About the Author

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.

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Product details

Hardcover: 464 pages

Publisher: Penguin Press (November 6, 2018)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1594204055

ISBN-13: 978-1594204050

Product Dimensions:

6.3 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.9 out of 5 stars

20 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#10,462 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

This book shows us at least two ways to view the Fugitive slave Act (FSA): First as the truest progeny of slavery; and then second as the truest reflection of all that is morally wrong with a nation lacking the courage to face its primary moral problems — like one that codifies in its Constitution the worse aspects of slavery in Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3, which was the basis for the FSA. The best that could be said about it even from its drafters, is that, as is true of all compromises, it too was imperfect.John Locke, the acknowledged philosophical father of the “American project,” as well as Alexi de Tocqueville, a French Sociologist, who visited the young nation in the 1830s, both agreed that the US polity had a moral weakness at its core, one with an overly strong investment in the institution of slavery as well as in the culture of racism. Both were correct in believing that this investment would eventually come back to haunt and bedevil the young nation. They also agreed on what to call this weakness: “moral incoherence.”Beginning well before the revolution, the author drives us up and down the rocky slopes of these heavily freighted moral themes — across two planes in the narrative. In the context, he gives us the rough details of how failing to confront slavery straight up, led to the FSA of 1850; and then in the subtext, he wrestles with the nation’s lack of moral coherence in dealing with slavery’s many consequences even up until today.Arguably, by 1850, when the FSA was unanimously enacted, the nation already was deep along the path to civil war, rendering the author’s claim that the FSA caused the Civil War, a rather moot point. One that fancy historical nuance and elaborate after the fact moral footwork was unlikely to overrule. In the end, the author’s thesis must stand or fall on its own merits along side many other candidates also recognized as primary causes of the war.My candidate as the most important cause of the war, would be the eight years of the gag rule where raising the issue of slavery was forbidden in Congress. Second, in my mind, would be the cowardly way slavery was finessed in the Constitution itself.These seeds of immorality palpably, were planted and nurtured early and firmly into the American cultural soil. An immoral seed cannot sprout into a moral flower, can it? When you split the moral baby in half, it still bleeds-out.The FSA was indeed a bad seed, a symbol of many of the grievances on both sides and served as a proxy for them. But to call it a cause of the war, given how deeply entrenched slavery and racism were already planted in the American soil, and so many other possibilities, it is a bit of a stretch to say that the FSA was the cause of the war. What about the seeds hidden inside the US Constitution?Rather than challenge this claim though, I found it much more interesting, and productive — although somewhat provocative — to follow the second plane, the subtext that highlights America’s “moral incoherence.” Which if understood properly, effectively is nothing but a lack of a collective moral conscience.We are a nation that, since slavery, has willingly allowed, and winked at, laws dealing with race, to be built up on clear violations of basic human moral principles. And then like the FSA, we have used those immoral laws (like Article 4, section, 2, clause 3 of the Constitution), as legal precedents.This book exposes this strategy in both the founding generation’s failure to confront slavery — as well as succeeding generations (including our own’s) failure to confront the legacies of slavery.The crux of the parallel subtextual argument is made clearer by those who firmly opposed slavery as a matter of principle and as a matter of human rights. Men such as John Adams and the afore-mentioned John Locke and Alexi de Tocqueville, all quickly identified this flaw in the American National character.The irrefutable evidence is that most of the forefathers were slave owners and thus were either indifferent to the moral contradictions inherent in the Constitution, or supported and defended them and the practices and profits they led to, all generated by slavery — and thus proved themselves to be mainstream “moral defectives,” willing to pay the moral price of enduring slavery’s contradictions with silent embarrassment. They were ever ready to split the moral baby in half, and defend their half, as it bled-out?Jefferson, Randolph, and Patrick Henry, among many others, were greatly troubled by it, but continued the practice despite a greatly troubled conscience. Their moral cowardice since, has become our own, and thus remains an incontrovertible part of our national signature.Locke, in placing slavery on the lowest rung of the ladder of human degradation — along side cannibalism and human sacrifice — made the more telling argument that nations end on that lowest rung only by placing their “man-made laws” above “natural,” or “god’s laws.”In short, and in a self-evident way, countries whose laws, politics and rules of cultural engagement, do not have morality built in as part of their foundation — as a minimum prerequisite — are countries most likely to tumble down into the abyss of moral incoherence.The story told here, at least on its most general level, thus is not so much about how the FSA kept the new nation’ guts tied in knots on its way down to the Civil War, but is a story of how the FSA is just another indicator of the tensions that built up in the pressure-cooker of the debates of both halves of the immoral generations as they sparred with each other on their way down into the abyss of moral incoherence over the single issue of slavery.The pressure-cooker eventually exploded, and the Civil War is what resulted, full stop. In this sense only, can the FSA be seen as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.Again, don’t get me wrong, the context, of how the FSA played a key role in the run down hill to the Civil War is an important story in itself, but in my view, it is not nearly as important a story as that of how our national culture and national character, since the nation’s inception, has been hijacked, misshaped, warped and so twisted by the moral cowardice that allowed slavery to be hidden in the Constitution in the first place, that we have evolved into a nation that still nurtures that cowardice, and one that still lacks the moral courage to deal with our nation’s most pressing moral problems — across the board.Moral cowardice on the issue of race, has become THE American signature. Put simply, in the choice between morality and white supremacy; or between morality and illicit profits, the American character, always chooses white supremacy and profits over morality.These moral compromises show up not just in the FSA, but everywhere across the landscape of American history. It is as if our nation has always lived by keeping two sets of moral books: hailing “white people’s liberty” on the one hand (just as was done in the Constitution), and claiming to be only a bit morally imperfect, on the other.In short, just as MLK’s bogus promissory note claims, the “American project” lives perpetually on moral credit: Ever since slavery, we have talked “freedom,” but walked and lived on “racism” and “immoral profits.”These moral compromises are thinly disguised in the three references to slavery in the Constitution. They have been bequeathed to us down the generations through a trail of human degradation that still makes us all cringe and anxious, and leaves us morally sapped, weak and unsteady, permanently tethered to the legacy of slavery even after it ended a century and a half ago.To wit: The Compromises of 1820; of 1850, the Missouri-Kansas compromise, the compromise of 1876 that got Rutherford B. Hayes elected; the compromises that ended the Civil War, the erection of the Black Codes, extra-legal lynchings, the Dred Scott and the Plessy versus Ferguson Decisions, a century of American Apartheid and Jim Crow, a two-tiered caste system leaving the sons and daughters of slaves permanently on the bottom tier, the rise of extra-legal groups and their vigilante killings, genocide and ethnic cleansing, extra-judicial killings called “justified homicides” performed daily by inner city police; and perhaps most important of all, slavery by more modern means, called mass incarceration of black and brown people for minor offenses.How is it that the abyss of slavery continues to evolve ever newer forms with each new generation, only in America?By now we all must be wondering if this moral incoherence, even though only a direct descendant of slavery, is not intentionally built into the nation’s moral code?Maybe it is not true that slavery is America’s original sin? After reading this book one is likely to agree that that distinction must be reserved for the meta-moral codes hidden in the US Constitution that allowed us to invest so heavily in slavery in the first place.Whatever that meta-moral code was, it allowed us to jump right over slavery and bequeath to succeeding generations, all of slavery’s worst parts: racial-hatred, a racial caste system, and politics and a culture bifurcated by race.After all, we are not the only nation to have imported African slaves, but we are the only nation still animated by, and whose politics are fueled almost entirely by, racial-hatred. Five Stars

This history is the most succinct account of the changing conditions in America leading to the Civil War, and a cautionary tale for those today who think they,and their tribe have all the answers. This hardening of perceptions and positions has.led the the present situation. On the one hand, militias and Oath Keepers, on the other, Antifa. Compared with the public conversation in the first half of the Nineteenth Centurt, the talk today is largely vapid, empty and reckless. It is sad the friends are sfraid to talk about public issues. Fear of anger or fear of fact free claims are rampant. Today, there is areal danger of institutional illegitimacy. Thus went the U.S. In 1861, Germany in 1932 and Russia in 1918. We have to get a grip and begin talking to each other without the rancor, without the fear, and without the umbrage.

Having read many books about the Civil War period, I was pleasantly surprised to find one that is both original and highly readable. The author deals with the plight of both slave and free blacks beginning with the colonial period. (Who knew that Ben Franklin had a slave?) He discusses the basic contradictions in the Constitution resulting from the founders attempt to accommodate slavery and the various attempts by the Northern states to frustrate slave catchers from the South through legal action and if, necessary, force. He also discusses the attempts to limit the spread of slavery: First came the Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery in the territories that became Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin, then came the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which allowed slavery in Missouri but banned it north of the latitude of its southern border, then the Compromise of 1850 which allowed the putative states free choice or “popular sovereignty” in New Mexico and Utah and finally the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1853 which allowed popular sovereignty in all the remaining territories and enacted the Fugitive Slave Act.The author points out that those opposed to slavery did not necessarily believe in equal rights for blacks. Often opposition was based on a fear that blacks willing to work for low wages would take jobs away from whites (cf. the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1886). Even the most ardent abolitionists were uncertain of how free blacks would fit into society and some proposed deportation to Liberia.My only nitpick is one tedious chapter about how the literati, e.g. Melville, Hawthorne, Wordsworth, Longfellow, etc., portrayed the problem in their literature. Otherwise, a great book to have in your library.

The border "wars", build a wall, and they are bring harm to our country. You read The War Before the War and realize how history is repeating itself. Slaves were denied opportunity for freedom in specific parts of the country and saw an opportunity to leave for better, but were either killed, jailed, beaten and sent back to their enslaver. After reading this book, you come away with a better understanding of why America's Soul this is not right. You come to understand how we allow ourselves as a nation to be pimped by fear. And how that fear is used to manipulate, cajole, and breed hatred against those that have the least. War is internal and it is with each and every one of us who sees injustice and wrong, but because of fear we fail to act. And not acting comes with a price. After reading this, I was left shaking my head because we fail to understand (even today) our history.

It is a fascinating story and I couldn't put it down. One thing I was not so clear about was the immense wealth that the slave-based cotton trade produced and how much of our economy, North and South depended on it. Everyone should read this.

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