The War Before The War: Fugitive Slaves And The Struggle For America’s Soul From The Revolution To The Civil War, by Andrew Delbanco

When I started this book, I was very concerned that the author would follow a common trend in contemporary historiography by inflating all political activism to the level of war heroism by comparing fugitive slaves to the brave soldiers who fought in the Civil War. Fortunately, in reading the book it became clear that the author had a much more restrained view of matters and saw the struggle over fugitive slaves to be part of a low-intensity insurgency effort between those who sought freedom and were often willing to engage in violence to defend themselves and their freedom from those who would take it away from them and those who were willing to engage in violence to deny people their basic liberties by considering them as mere chattel property. This is by no means a perfect book, and the author’s insistence on making gratuitous political swipes at contemporary political opponents (which includes this reader, it must be admitted) detracts from the book’s overall value, not least because the author seems to underestimate the dangers of the contemporary political climate in precisely the same way that the dangers of the situation of the 1850s in the North and South were minimized by many people who sought to preserve the unity of the United States in the face of increasingly irreconcilable positions.

In terms of its contents, this book is nearly 400 pages long and though a pretty long book ends up being a compelling history of the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War, at least so far as it sticks to history and avoids dipping into contemporary political discussions, as the author is prone to do in frequent digressions. `This book is fourteen chapters divided into two parts roughly equally in length. After a short introduction, the author spends the first seven chapters talking about the long fuse of the fugitive slave crisis that eventually formed an important component of sparking the hostilities of the Civil War (I). These chapters include a look at the problem of slavery (1), slavery and the founders (2), the compromises involved in the creation of the Constitution (3), the trouble over the first Fugitive Slave Act (4), the fate of those caught while seeking escape (5), the war of words over fugitive slaves (6), and the struggle over the act and its application in the courts (7). The second half of the book then discusses how the fuse over fugitives from slavery destroyed the comity of the American people between north and south over the behavior of slaves and those who sought to kidnap blacks (some of them not fugitives) and force them into slavery (II). These chapters include a discussion of the growing crisis over slavery and antislavery in the 1840s (8), the state of the Union after the Mexican War (9), the last truce of the Compromise of 1850 (10), the explosion of problems that resulted from the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (11), the trials of conscience suffered by those who had compassion on blacks but also a commitment to the legal order (12), the end of compromise with rising hostility between the North and South (13), and the coming of the war and its implications for slavery (14). The book then ends with acknowledgements, illustrations, notes, and an index.

While this book is by no means a perfect one, there are some elements of the book that are particularly enjoyable to read. The author, if by no means a Civil War historian, is knowledgeable about many of the writings of the first part of the 19th century, many of which deal obliquely or, in the case of Melville and Stowe, more directly with the subject of slavery in America. The author also has a strong degree of sensitivity towards those who were emotionally hostile to slavery but held their tongue and also saw abolitionists as behaving in ways that sometimes made things worse for slaves by making the people of the South more angry. This is a common problem in our own age, where political hostility tends to reduce the space that people have to moderate their ways in the face of self-righteous and often hypocritical strident messaging. Ultimately, of course, we know what happened in the Civil War and thus tend to anachronistically assign blame and disparage nuance and complexity in how people respond to their times and irreconcilable positions and commitments, and the author seeks for us to regain a sense of uncertainty about the past so that we may put ourselves in the shoes of people in the past and realize that we are often no better than those people who struggled in the past to do what was right in the face of the complexity of their own times.