The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War in The Majority Report Podcast Goodreads Group

Oct 27, 2020 Johnsonk5 rated it it was amazing

Shelves: us-history, politics, history

One of the rare cases of a historical book that is simultaneously so readable and informative that I could not put it down. Delbanco is clearly a gifted writer and he is easily just as good a historian. This work is focused and yet, very broad in it's scope.

Delbanco's thesis is that fugitive slaves represented a fundamental flaw in the compromise between the slave and free states following the Revolutionary War. This flaw demonstrated that slavery was not just a disagreement on labor practices t One of the rare cases of a historical book that is simultaneously so readable and informative that I could not put it down. Delbanco is clearly a gifted writer and he is easily just as good a historian. This work is focused and yet, very broad in it's scope.

Delbanco's thesis is that fugitive slaves represented a fundamental flaw in the compromise between the slave and free states following the Revolutionary War. This flaw demonstrated that slavery was not just a disagreement on labor practices that could be let alone by those not involved but rather a grotesque evil, horrid enough to keep you up at night if you were living under a banner that permitted such a practice.

Every time a slave escaped to the North, their desperation left a stone in the shoe of every northerner that heard their story. Every northerner had to think to themselves "if slavery isn't all that bad, why are these folks so desperate to escape it?" and this question birthed the fervent abolition movement as well as the perturbations that kept all of the moderates up at night. Ultimately, this debate may have led to the breakdown of the Union and eventually, the abolition of slavery.

Delbanco does not fail to recount the horrors of slavery. He tells stories of people killing themselves to escape slavery and, on one occasion, even murdering their own children to save them from the horrors of this institution. And yet, at the same time, he treats every character in the story with the utmost empathy and understanding. He presents a sympathetic view of many of the moderates who expressed moral indignance towards slavery but a little too much sympathy with slaveholders. He even tries to see the good in John C. Calhoun, who one might argue is the Emperor Palpatine of the story, by noting that he was, if nothing else, a man of principles, even if those principles were grotesquely immoral.

It's unclear to me how much of this was intended at the outset, but it seems to me that there are a great degree of modern parallels at work here. As Delbanco notes, the relative number of fugitive slaves would make you think that it was a rather unimportant issue. And yet, so much energy was expended fighting over this issue because it has symbolic significance to people on both sides. To the pro-slavery movement, the way the North treated fugitive slaves was a manifestation of their respect for Southern culture and tradition while the fugitive slaves represented a crack in the foundation of this way of life. For the anti-slavery movement, the treatment of fugitive slaves was symbolic for the nation's respect for human dignity and it was a first step towards the abolition of the practice. This symbolic representation of the issue explains the intensity with which people fought over this relatively minor issue.

A similar thing can be said of police killings of black men in the modern day. For one side, it is important to defend the police as a means for upholding law and order. While, for the other side, the treatment of one black man at a traffic stop is representative of the way American society treats people of color. Today, we are fighting a symbolic war, just like the one that was fought 200 years ago over fugitive slaves. As Mark Twain (may or may not have) once said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

In the second to last chapter of the book, Delbanco has what might be his most illuminating thought in an already thoughtful book. He says that the leadup to the Civil War can be seen as a period in which the word 'compromise' slowly loses it's meaning. Prior to the Civil War, compromise was something that reasonable and intelligent people did to further their goals while meeting in the middle with the fellow across the aisle. But as the war approached, icons of compromise like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster became seen as repulsive figures without a real backbone. Compromise, which was once understood to be a noble trait, became seen as a cowardly one. Again, the parallels to the modern day are almost undeniable.

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Mar 27, 2025 Doug Poore rated it it was amazing

a masterpiece. documenting all the bad faith excuses used by the southern white devils & many of their northern financial enablers. lots of parallels to today's maga fascists. ...more

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