Reviews in American History

Every so often I get emails from a local organization that monitors the arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants from the city where I live. As a historian of slavery in the 19th-century United States, I cannot help but see parallels between the plight of these migrants and that of fugitive slaves and free black northerners in the 1850s who were deprived of the rights of citizenship and subjected to kidnapping and rendition into slavery. I realize, to my shame, that my usual reaction to these emails falls well short of the bold resistance that abolitionists threw up against the slave-catchers and man-stealers in their day. But then again, I am merely a historian and not an immigration lawyer or political activist. And as a resident of Washington, D.C., I don't even have a voting representative in Congress to complain to. Instead, my job is to study and teach history in the faint hope that understanding the past will lead to inspiration and wisdom in confronting today's pressing challenges.

Those challenges are never far from the surface of two recent books on the fugitive slave crisis in the early United States, Andrew Delbanco's The War Before The War and Richard Blackett's The Captive's Quest for Freedom. These books invite reflection on how tightly slavery was woven into the fabric of the early United States and how that fabric unraveled as black people struggled to get and stay free. Delbanco's and Blackett's books also invite reflection on the strategic and tactical dilemmas of defying unjust laws and the moral and political injuries inflicted by their enforcement. What is fascinating from a historiographical perspective is how dissimilar these books are from each other in substance and style despite the fact that they cover similar historical ground. Their differences arise in part from the gap between commercial and [End Page 363] academic publishing, but also from a more fundamental contrast in the basic questions that animate each book.

Andrew Delbanco, the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University (a distinguished title if ever there was one!), is an eminent and prize-winning scholar of American literature, culture, and history. His biography of Melville is one of my favorites. It is not surprising, then, that The War Before The War has an interdisciplinary vitality. Delbanco ranges delightfully from analyzing debates in Congress to narrating street melees to parsing the impact of the fugitive slave drama on Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Stowe. (He cannot resist noting, for example, that the Chief Justice in a significant case before the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1836 was Melville's future father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw.¹) Delbanco writes with clarity and verve. The sources are documented in rich but unobtrusive endnotes, hidden where only the most curious readers of this Penguin Press book will find them.

Delbanco's book sails briskly across American history from the Revolution to the Civil War, making frequent landfalls at pivotal moments of controversy over "The Problem" of fugitive slaves. Nothing here is terra incognita to historians, but historians are not the target audience. The book is speaking to nonspecialists and lifelong learners who are interested in history, read books, and could use a refresher course on the topic, like NPR's Steve Inskeep, whom I recently heard interview Delbanco on the radio on the topic of reparations, which is not what the book is about.² What the book is about, writes Delbanco, is the question of the sacrifice of principle in the world of politics. "The driving question of this book," he explains, is how people who genuinely hated slavery, like Lincoln, could swallow the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (p. 6). The short answer is that they valued the...