Description: "The cause of disunion was the persistent determination on the part of enslaved people that they would flee bondage no matter the risks. By protesting against kidnappings and fugitive slave renditions, they brought slavery to the doorstep of the free states, forcing those states to recognize the meaning of freedom and the meaning of states' rights in the face of a federal government equally determined to keep standing its divided house. In so doing African Americans helped northerners and westerners to question whether or not the Constitutional compact was still worth upholding, a reevaluation of the republican experiment that would ultimately lead not just to Civil War, but to the 13th Amendment ending slavery. The real story of American freedom lay not with the Confederate Rebels or even with the Union Army, but instead rests with the tens of thousands of self-emancipated men and women who had to be the ones to demonstrate to the Founders and to succeeding generations of Americans the value of liberty"--
Brief description: JONATHAN DANIEL WELLS is a professor of history in the department of Afroamerican and African Studies, the Residential College, and the department of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of several books, including Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South and most recently, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War.
Review Quotes: Wells's explanation of the growth of free-soil identity in the North and the centrality of fugitives in that process is accurate, important, and clearer than a number of recent attempts by other scholars. That is a praiseworthy accomplishment.--Robert Churchill "Journal of Southern History"