This is the first of a few thematic timelines of American history I am preparing for my general exams. Two others that I plan to complete in the next week and a half are on citizenship and state building. This timeline ends in 1866. The Reconstruction era will be part of the citizenship timeline. I welcome any and all feedback and corrections that people may have to offer. This timeline is somewhat idosyncratic in that it reflects the concerns of my examiners, Lisa McGirr and John Stauffer.
1502 — The first African slaves arrive in the Americas[1]. Over the next four hundred years, according to Walter Johnson, “ten to eleven million people—fifty or sixty thousand a year in the peak decades between 1700 and 1850—were packed beneath slave ship decks and sent to the New World. Indeed, up to the year 1820, five times as many Africans travelled across the Atlantic as did Europeans.” These numbers do not include the dead.[2]
1513 — The “sale of licenses for importing Negroes was a source of profit for the Spanish government.”[3]
1518 — Bartolomé de Las Casas makes a “proposal to the Spanish Crown for the replacing Indian laborers with Negroes purchased in Iberia.”[4]
1619 — The first African slaves arrive in Jamestown, Virginia.
1685 — The Code Noir is adopted in the French West Indies. It defines “Negroes… as chattels… to be baptized and instructed in the true faith” and excused from work on Sunday.[5]
1688 — Aphra Behn publishes Oroonoko; or the History of the Royal Slave. It is an early instance of the myth of noble savage and portrays Africans as corrupted by the institution of slavery.
1709 — Slavery is legally established in Canada (then under French control).[6]
1736 — Perfectionism leads the Quaker Benjamin Lay to try “to prove that antislavery was the crucial test of religious purity.”[7] Earlier Quakers, William Edmundson in 1676 and a group in Germantown, Pennslyvania in 1688 for example, had protested against slavery to little effect.[8]
1740 — The “courts in South Carolina held that color of an Indian, unlike that of a Negro, was not prima facie evidence of slavery.”[9]
1754 — John Woolman publishes Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, a text which has considerable influence on convincing Quakers to become antislavery.[10]
1755 — Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishes Discours sur l’inégalité arguing, “Men were born fee and equal; the renunciation of liberty meant the renunciation of being a man.”[11] Benjamin Franklin publishes Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. It is among the first texts to argue that slave labor is more expensive, and thus inferior to, than free labor.[12]
1756 — Slaves constitute 16% of the population of New York City[13]. The Society of Friends takes “serious steps to induce owners to provide their slaves with religious instruction.”[14]
1758 — The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends excludes slave traders from its business meetings.[15]
1761 — The London Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends “announced that slave dealers merited disownment.”[16]
1762 — The second part of John Woolman’s Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes is published.[17]
1770 — Abbé Raynal publishes Histoire des deux Indes, which according to David Brion Davis, is “an example of the Enlightenment’s faith in reason and nature” that formed the first source of antislavery thought[18].
1771 — The Massachusetts legislature outlaws the importation of slaves.[19]
1772 — Lord Mansfield decides in Somerset’s Case in England that slavery can only be established via positive law.[20]
1774 — John Wesley publishes Thoughts upon Slavery arguing that “since the same causes always produce similar effects, ‘the dreadful consequence of slavery is the same amongst every people.’”[21]
1776 — The Revolutionary War breaks out. Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations claiming “the relations between slave and master epitomized those artificial restraints that prevented self-interest from being harnessed to the general good.”[22] John Woolman dies while on trip to Britain. Samuel Hopkins publishes A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, proclaiming that it is hypocritical for whites to fight for their liberty while keeping slaves. The oppression that the colonists face from the British, he argues, is God’s punishment for having slaves.
1780 — Pennsylvania’s Act for Emancipation is passed and, according to Robert Cover, serves as “a pro type for all the gradual emancipation statutes that followed… Everyone born after July 4, 1780, was to be born free. Persons already slaves before that date would owe service for life. The children of these servants for life would inherit an obligation for service for twenty-eight years.” Tom Paine writes the preamble to the Act.[23] Massachusetts ratifies a constitution that declares “All men are born free and equal…”[24] The 1840 census is the last one that reports slaves in Pennsylvania.[25]
1781 — Quock Walker cases begin. Walker, a slave in Massachusetts, runs away and then sues his master for beating him when he is caught. As a result, either in 1781 or 1783, the state courts decide that the Massachusetts constitution forbids slavery under the “free and equal” clause.[26]
1782 — Virginia passes a Manumission Act that allows for the private manumission of slaves. The Act is modified by the Removal Act of 1806 which requires “freed Negroes to leave the state within twelve months or upon reaching their majority.”[27]
1787 — The Constitution is adopted by the original thirteen colonies. It includes several clauses that focus on slavery. Article I Section 2 states “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned… according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons… three fifths of all other Persons.” Article I Section 9 allows the prohibition of the slave trade after 1808. Article IV Section 2 includes the fugitive slave clause, “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” Some scholars interpret Article IV Section 4 which says that the federal government will protect “every State in this Union… against domestic Violence” as relating to an obligation to suppress slave rebellions.[28] Between 1787 and 1810 170,000 slaves are imported into the country. Congress passes the Northwest Ordinance which prohibits slavery in federal territory north of the Ohio River.[29]
1790 — More than 90 percent of enslaved people live in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, George and what will become Kentucky. Exports from the southern states account for almost a third of the country’s total exports.[30]
1791 — Civil war breaks out in the French colony of St. Domingue (present day Haiti) and slaves in the North Providence revolt.[31]
1792 — The Militia Act of 1792 restricts service in the army to “every free able-bodied white male citizen.”[32]
1793 — Congress passes an Act to enforce the Fugitive Slave clause. It “provided for enforcement… by way of summary process before any federal judge or state magistrate.” Abolitionists would later claim that this meant escaped slaves were entitled to trial by jury.[33] The cotton gin is invented, transforming the textile industry.
1799 — New York passes a gradual act of abolition.
1803 — With the Louisiana Purchase the United States acquires what will eventually become the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.[34]
1804 — The Republic Haiti is formed making it the first independent black nation in the Americas.[35]
1804 — New Jersey passes a gradual act of abolition.[36]
1808 — Congress outlaws the international slave trade. Over the next fifty five years approximately one million African Americans are sold within the United States, primarily from the upper to the lower South.[37]
1816 — The American Colonization Society is formed to promote the colonization of free African Americans to Africa.[38] Eventually the society will repatriate more than 12,000 freed slaves in Africa.[39] Richard Allen founds the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, the first independent African American denomination.[40]
1819 — Congress passes legislation authorizing the President to send armed ships to Africa to suppress the illegal American slave trade.[41]
1820 — The Missouri Compromise allows for the admission of Missouri as a slave state but prohibits slavery in unorganized territory north of 36º30’ latitude.[42] Maine is admitted as a free state.[43]
1821 — Missouri is admitted as a slave state.[44]
1822 — In the case of La Jeune Eugenie, a slave ship flying the French flag, the Supreme Court, with Justice Joseph Story writing the majority opinion, rules “that only when the flag of the ship permits the trade under its domestic law, can the slaver claim any status other than pirate.”[45] In South Carolina, Denmark Vesey’s planned slave rebellion is discovered.[46]
1825 — In the case of The Antelope the Supreme Court overturns its decision in La Jeune Eugenie.[47]
1827 — New York ends slavery.[48]
1830 — David Walker publishes his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, an early, if not the earliest, black nationalist text. Walker’s appeal convinces William Lloyd Garrison to reject colonization.[49]
1831 — William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing The Liberator on January 1. Inspired by a vision similar to Revelation, Nat Turner launches his rebellion in Southhampton County, Virginia on August 21. Nat and his supporters massacre every white that they encounter, approximately sixty people. They head for Jerusalem, the county seat, with the belief that if they can somehow reach there God will bring about an apocalyptic ending to slavery. The insurrection fails the day it is launched, Nat is captured on October 30 and executed on November 11.[50]
1832 — The nullification crisis erupts between the federal government and South Carolina over the issue of states rights. The South Carolina legislature votes to hold the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null, void and having no effect in the state (planters felt that tariffs benefitted Northern manufacturers but undermined the plantation economy by making it more difficult to sell goods in Europe). In response, President Jackson threatens to march federal troops into South Carolina to collect the tariffs. South Carolina threatens to secede. The administration agrees to reduce the tariff and the crisis is averted.[51] The New England Anti-Slavery Society is formed by William Lloyd Garrison and 12 other members.
1833 — Slavery is abolished throughout the British empire.[52] The American Anti-Slavery Society is formed with 62 delegates. Lydia Maria Child publishes An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. In her book Child synthesizes the various arguments against slavery and advocates interracial marriage as a way to end racism.
1834 — George Bancroft publishes History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent. According to David Brion Davis, it is an example of the kind of “popular democracy” that formed a third source of antislavery thought by suggesting that slavery was not part of the European vision for the Americas. Bancroft wrote, “Nothing came from Europe but a free people.”[53]
1835 — Most Southern states bar abolitionist writings.[54]
1836 — State laws over slavery begin to become conflict with each other. In Massachusetts, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw rules, in Commonwealth v. Aves, “that the moment that the master carries his slave into a country where domestic slavery is not permitted, he becomes free.”[55]
1837 — Congress adopts Gag Rule to prohibit antislavery petitions.[56] Abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy is murdered in Alton, Illinois.[57]
1839 — In the case of the Amistad, a group of enslaved Africans rose up in mutiny and seized control of slave ship. The Supreme Court, after hearing arguments from the antislavery John Quincy Adams, with Justice Story writing the opinion, decides that because the Africans were illegally enslaved they had a right to mutiny. The ship had a Spanish flag. Robert Cover summarizes Adams argument: “It is because there is no law, Spanish or American that authorizes the slavery, that the Negroes are entitled to fall back on natural law even to the extent of revolution.”[58] Theodore Dwight Weld and Angelina Grimke compile American Slavery as It Is from southern newspaper clippings and first-hand accounts.[59]
1840 — The Liberty Party, the first antislavery party, is founded. Many earlier antislavery activists thought that reform could not come through political parties. Salmon Chase’s career traces the development of political antislavery. He goes on to help start both the Free Soil Party and the Republican Party. According to Eric Foner, the party platform “included attacks on slavery for impoverishing the southern states, denying southern laborers the right to an education, and regarded and dishonoring laborers generally.” Liberty Party members argue that slavery is a state, not a national, institution.[60] Auguste Comte publishes Cours de philosophy positive. According to David Brion Davis, it “rested on a rigidly prescribed series of ascending stages of history” of which slavery “became a useless vestige as society progressed.” Along with Henri Wallon, he provides an example of the “belief in the progress of Christian and scientific principles” that served the second source of antislavery thought.[61]
1842 — The case of the Creole, an American slave ship on which there was a mutiny, comes before the Supreme Court. The slaves landed in British territory seeking freedom. The antislavery lawyer William Jay argued, “When slaves are shipped on the high seas, the protection afforded by the law the creates slavery ceases.” The case is settled through international arbitration. The slaves remain free but Britain is ordered to pay $100,000 in damages.[62]
1844 — Wendell Phillips publishes The Constitution: A Proslavery Compact, the first of three works in which he argues, on behalf of the Garrisonian abolitionists, that the Constitution was “a compromise over slavery” with five proslavery provisions: the three-fifths clause; “the limitation on the power of Congress to prohibit the ‘migration or importation’ of slaves until 1808; the Fugitive Slave clause; the clause affording Congress the power to suppress insurrection; the clause insuring, upon application from a state, federal assistance in the suppression of domestic violence.” He further claims that judges cannot abrogate slavery simply because they view in conflict with natural law.[63] Congress rescinds the Gag Rule.[64]
1845 — New Jersey ratifies a new constitution with a “free and equal” clause. In two cases, State v. Post and State v. Van Buren, the State Supreme Court rules that the “free and equal” clause does not preclude slavery.[65] Texas is admitted as a slave state.[66]
1847 — Henri Wallon publishes Histoire de l’esclavage, which according to David Brion Davis, conceived of history as a kind of “historical progress resulting from the spread and influence of Christianity.” In Wallon’s view “slavery and the progress of Christianity were mutually exclusive.”[67] Frederick Douglass begins publishing The North Star.[68]
1848 — The Free Soil Party forms as a coalition of people in the Liberty Party who do not advocate immediate abolition, the Conscience (anti-slavery) Whigs and Barnburner (anti-slavery) Democrats. Their main belief is that the Constitution does not establish slavery in federal territory.[69] Connecticut ends slavery.[70]
1849 — Henry David Thoreau publishes “Civil Disobedience.”
1850 — The Fugitive Slave Act updates the 1793 Act. According to Cover, “It provided for the appointment of special federal commissioners who would hear the fugitive rendition proceedings and issue certificates of removal. The commissioner was to hear the slaveholder or his representative… the act explicitly excluded the alleged fugitive’s testimony from the proceeding.”[71] The Fugitive Slave Act is part of the Compromise of 1850 which admits California as a free state and empowers the voters of the New Mexico and Utah territories to decide the question for themselves.[72]
1851 — In the rendition of Thomas Sims Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Lemuel Shaw, who is antislavery, denies Sims a writ of habus corpus. Sims is returned to the South.[73] Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick.
1852 — Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the antebellum period’s bestseller, selling 300,000 copies. Stowe concludes her novel by warning that if the country doesn’t end slavery then God will bring “the day of vengeance” and do it.[74] Frederick Douglass delivers his speech “The Meaning of the July Fourth for the Negro” in Rochester, New York on July 5.
1854 — Kansas-Nebraska Act, supported by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglass, is passed, repudiating the Compromise of 1820, it empowers settlers in Kansas and Nebraska to vote on slavery.[75] In the Act’s wake state-wide Republican parties are formed by antislavery politicians who insist that “no further political compromise with slavery was possible.” Their principal demand is no extension of slavery outside of the existing slave states.[76] Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner gives his “Freedom National; Slavery Sectional” speech in opposition to the Act.[77] The rendition of Anthony Burns outrages Boston residents. In response, Henry David Thoreau writes “Slavery in Massachusetts.” That same year he publishes Walden.[78]
1855 — The Radical Abolitionist party is formed by Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, James McCune Smith, John Brown and others in Syracuse, New York. According to John Stauffer, “the party’s platform specifically affirmed violence as a way to end slavery and oppression.”[79]
1856, February — The national Republican Party is founded in Pittsburgh. It’s platform “linked slavery and polygamy as ‘twin relics of barbarism’ …endorsed Chase’s constitutional position that the federal government was bound to abolish slavery everywhere within its jurisdiction, and specifically denied the authority of either Congress or a territorial legislature to establish slavery in any territory.”[80]
1856, May 19 and 20 — Charles Sumner delivers his speech “The Crime Against Kansas” likening Senator Butler from South Carolina and Stephen Douglas to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and claiming they are in love with “the harlot Slavery” and likening proslavery settlers in Kansas to rapists.[81]
1856, May 21 — Guerrilla fighting starts in “Bleeding Kansas” when proslavery invaders from Missouri attack the antislavery of Lawrence, Kansas.[82]
1856, May 22 — South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks, Senator Butler’s nephew, brutally canes Sumner on the Senate floor, leaving him bloody and unconscious.[83]
1856, May 24 — John Brown and his sons massacre five proslavery settlers in Pottawatomie, Kansas.[84]
1856, November 4 — Republican presidential candidate John Frémont carries eleven northern states. Democrat James Buchanan wins the election by carrying all of the Southern slave states.[85]
1857 — Dred Scott v. Sanford is decided by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger Taney. In the case Dred Scott claims that he had been rendered free when his master had transported him onto free soil. In the decision, Taney declares that no black person could be a citizen of the United States and that “because the Constitution ‘distinctly and expressed affirmed’ the right to property in slaves, slaveholders could bring them into the federal territories.” Scott did not become free when he was transported into the free territory of Minnesota. The Missouri Compromise, repealed by the Kansas Nebraska Act, was also judged to have been unconstitutional.[86]
1859, October 16 — John Brown launches his raid on Harper’s Ferry with twenty-one men (sixteen white and five blacks) hoping that he can spark a slave revolt throughout Virginia. The raid fails. Robert E. Lee leads the marines who capture Brown and several of his conspirators. The raid was financed by Gerrit Smith and five other white abolitionists known as the “committee of six.” Brown tries to recruit Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to participate.[87]
1859, October 30 to November 3 — Henry David Thoreau delivers “A Plea for Captain John Brown” in Concord, Boston, and Worcester, Massachusetts.[88]
1859, December 2 — John Brown is executed. He remain unrepentant to the last.[89]
1860, June 4 — Charles Sumner delivers “The Barbarism of Slavery,” his first speech in the Senate since his caning by Preston Brooks. In it he argues that slavery morally corrupts slave owners. Southern political leaders and many Northern moderates are outraged.[90]
1860, November 6 — Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln wins the election with 40% of the popular vote. He doesn’t carry a single southern state.[91]
1860, December 20 — South Carolina becomes the first state to secede from the Union.[92] Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas soon follow.[93]
1861, January 29 — Kansas is admitted as a free state.[94]
1861, late February — The Confederate States of America is organized with a provisional government. According to Stephanie McCurry, “The new Confederate Constitution left no doubt that slavery was the foundation of the new republic; it was a proslavery Constitution for a proslavery state.” Further, “the provisional government crafted a document that defined slaves explicitly as property, put slaves definitively outside the boundaries of the political community, prohibited the incorporation of any new state that did not sanction slavery, and put it beyond the power of the federal government to… interfere with the legality of slave property or rights of slave holders.”[95]
1861, April 12 — South Carolina troops open fire on federal troops at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.[96]
1861, April 17 — With federal troops moving into the South,Virginia secedes from the Union.[97] Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee follow. The slave states of Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland stay in the Union.[98]
1861, May 23 to 30 —Three slaves runaway to Fortress Monroe, seeking freedom across the Union line. General Benjamin Butler takes them in and puts them to work. President Lincoln approves Butler’s contraband policy on May 30. According to James Oakes this meant, “Union troops were not permitted to interfere with the ordinary operations of slavery in the rebellious states… But if a state declared itself in rebellion against the laws of the United States, and if any slaves in those states ‘come within your lines,’ Butler was to ‘refrain from surrendering’ such slaves to their ‘alleged masters.’ …Butler was to employ able-bodied slaves as he saw fit, keeping careful records and charging the expenses for the case of their families against the wages of the refugees.”[99]
1861, August 6 to 8 — Congress passes the First Confiscation Act. Under the terms of this act, “The slaves of disloyal masters were emancipated.” The War Department implements the act two days later, emancipation begins. Essentially, “slave voluntarily entering Union lines from the Union were emancipated.”[100] Shortly afterwards, some slaves in border states begin to flee their masters for army camps. Upon arrival in the camps the slaves would denounce their masters as secessionists and claim freedom.[101] According to James Oakes, the Act “required either district or circuit courts to determine the guilt or innocence of any rebels whose property had been seized.”[102]
1861, August 30 — General John Frémont issues a proclamation in Missouri declaring martial law, overturning civilian authority, confiscating the property of disloyal owners, and emancipating slaves of disloyal owners.[103] President Lincoln partially overturns the proclamation. His objection is that it overturns civilian rule by not following the court process outlined in the First Confiscation Act.
1862, February to June — More than ten thousand former slaves on the North Carolina Sea Islands are emancipated via the First Confiscation Act.[104] Tens of thousands more
1862, April 16 — President Lincoln signs a bill outlawing slavery in the District of Columbia.[105]
1862, July 4 — Frederick Douglass delivers his speech “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion” in Himrods Corner, New York.
1862, July 17 — Congress passes the Second Confiscation Act. According to James Oakes, “The easiest way to understand the statute is to grasp the relative simplicity of its most important goal: it would free the slaves of all disloyal masters. This would extend emancipation far beyond the scope of the First Confiscation Act, which applied only to slaves actually used in the rebellion.”[106]
1862, September 22 — President Lincoln issues a “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.” According to James Oakes it states, that “Universal emancipation would commence in the parts of the South not occupied by the Union but still in rebellion on January 1, 1863.
1862, December 31 — President Lincoln signs a bill making the abolition of slavery a prerequisite for admission into the Union.[107] This initially applies to West Virginia.
1863, January 1 —President Lincoln issues the “Emancipation Proclamation.” According to James Oakes, it differed from earlier documents on two points: invited slaves to come within Union lines with the promise of freedom; and it lifted the ban on black enlistment in the Union army.[108]
1863, January 5 — Attorney General Edward Bates rules that “as far as citizenship was concerned, there was no distinction between blacks and whites.”[109]
1863, March 3 — Congress passes a national draft law. The repeal of 1792 Militia Act by the Militia Act of 1862 makes blacks eligible for the draft. The Union army begins to draft black soldiers.[110]
1865, April 9 — Robert Lee surrenders at Appomattox Court House. The Civil War is officially over.
1865, December 18 — The Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery, is certified. Its first section reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”[111] Until then slavery had continued to exist in Kentucky and Delaware.[112]
1866, February 10 — Texas is readmitted to the Union and slavery is outlawed everywhere in the nation.[113]
[1] David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 8.
[2] Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4.
[3] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 8.
[4] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 169.
[5] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 207.
[6] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 126.
[7] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 291.
[8] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 307-309.
[9] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 179.
[10] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 484.
[11] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 413.
[12] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 427.
[13] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 135.
[14] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 305.
[15] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 330.
[16] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 330.
[17] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 492.
[18] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 13.
[19] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 488.
[20] Robert Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), 16-17.
[21] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 383.
[22] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 434.
[23] Cover, 62-63.
[24] Cover 44.
[25] Cover 160.
[26] Cover 43-50.
[27] Cover 67.
[28] Richard Beeman, The Penguin Guide to the United States; A Fully Annotated Declaration of Independence, U. S. Constitution and Amendments, and Selections from The Federalist Papers (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 22, 51, 53.
[29] Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origin of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 18-19.
[30] Rothman 3-4.
[31] David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), 28.
[32] James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861—1865 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 360.
[33] Cover 162.
[34] Rothman 18.
[35] Rothman 21.
[36] Cover 55.
[37] Johnson 5.
[38] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 33.
[39] Paul Boyer, American History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 49.
[40] Peter Hinks, introduction in David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. and introduction by Peter Hinks (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), xx.
[41] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 34.
[42] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 35.
[43] William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery; Selections from the Liberator, ed. and introduction William Cain (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 187.
[44] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 35.
[45] Cover 101-105.
[46] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 35.
[47] Cover 101-105.
[48] Cover 160.
[49] Hinks n 122.
[50] The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, ed. and introduction by Kenneth Greenberg (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 1-3.
[51] Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 114-128 passim.
[52] Boyer 49.
[53] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 13; George Bancroft quote in Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 23.
[54] Cain 188.
[55] Lemuel Shaw quoted in Cover, 94.
[56] Cain 189.
[57] Boyer 50.
[58] Cover 111.
[59] Boyer 50.
[60] Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 60.
[61] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 20, 13.
[62] Cover 114.
[63] Cover 153.
[64] Cain 190.
[65] Cover, 55-61.
[66] Cain 190.
[67] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 18, 19.
[68] Cain 190.
[69] Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 87.
[70] Cover 160.
[71] Cover 175.
[72] Boyer 48.
[73] Cover 176-177.
[74] Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Bantam Class, 1980 [1852]), 446.
[75] Boyer 51.
[76] Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 127.
[77] Oakes 32.
[78] Elizabeth Hall Witherell, “Chronology” in Henry David Thoreau Collected Essays and Poems, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell (New York: The Library of America, 2001), 653.
[79] John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 8.
[80] Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 130.
[81] Charles Sumner, “The Crime Against Kansas” in The Works of Charles Sumner Vol. 4 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1872), 144.
[82] Boyer 52.
[83] Stauffer 20.
[84] Boyer 52.
[85] Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial; Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 82.
[86] Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial, 92.
[87] Stauffer 236-261 passim
[88] Witherell 655.
[89] Stauffer 260.
[90] Charles Sumner, “The Barbarism of Slavery” in The Works of Charles Sumner Vol. 5 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1872), 1-174.
[91] Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial, 143.
[92] Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2010), 40.
[93] McCurry 53.
[94] Boyer 52.
[95] McCurry 78, 221.
[96] McCurry 68.
[97] McCurry 74.
[98] McCurry 53.
[99] Oakes 99-100.
[100] Oakes 138, 139.
[101] Oakes 169.
[102] Oakes 119.
[103] Oakes 157.
[104] Oakes 207.
[105] Oakes 274.
[106] Oakes 236.
[107] Oakes 299.
[108] Oakes 344.
[109] Oakes 358.
[110] Oakes 361.
[111] Beeman 75.
[112] Oakes 482.
[113] Oakes 488.
