Product Description: William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) was one of the most militant and uncompromising abolitionists in the United States. As the editor of the abolitionist paper The Liberator and cofounder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Garrison spent most of his life arguing against slavery on strictly moral grounds...read more

Before the Civil War, slaveholders made themselves into the most powerful, most deeply rooted, and best organized private interest group within the United States. Not only did slavery represent the national economy's second largest capital investment, exceeded only by investment in real estate, but guarantees of its perpetuation were studded throughout the U.S. Constitution. The vast majority of white Americans, in North and South, accepted the institution, and pro-slavery presidents and congressmen consistently promoted its interests. In Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War, James Brewer Stewart explains how a small group of radical activists, the abolitionist movement, played a pivotal role in turning American politics against this formidable system. He examines what influence the movement had in creating the political crises that led to civil war and evaluates the extent to which a small number of zealous reformers made a truly significant political difference when demanding that their nation face up to its most excruciating moral problem. In making these assessments, Stewart addresses a series of more specific questions: What were the abolitionists actually up against when seeking the overthrow of slavery and white supremacy? What motivated and sustained them during their long and difficult struggles? What larger historical contexts (religious, social, economic, cultural, and political) influenced their choices and determined their behavior? What roles did extraordinary leaders play in shaping the movement, and what were the contributions of abolitionism's unheralded foot soldiers ? What factors ultimately determined, for better or worse, the abolitionists' impact on American politics and the realization of their equalitarian goals?

Product Description: By 1840, American politics was a paradox―unprecedented freedom and equality for men of European descent, and the simultaneous isolation and degradation of people of African and Native American descent. Historians have characterized this phenomenon as the 'white republic...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: How did racial prejudice originate and why has it been so deeply rooted in American culture? What have been the long-term effects of prejudice on the intellectual, communal, and psychological resources of African Americans? How might the nightmare of racial domination be truly brought to an end? Still pertinent today, these were among the key questions addressed more than a century and a half ago by Hosea Easton (1799--1837), an important yet long neglected activist and intellectual...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Throughout the Civil War era, no other white American spoke more powerfully against slavery and for the ideals of racial democracy than did Wendell Phillips. Nationally famous as "abolition's golden trumpet," Phillips became the North's most widely hailed public lecturer, even though he espoused ideas most regarded as deeply threatening -- the abolition of slavery, equality among races and classes, and women's rights...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Revised to include important new scholarship, James Brewer Stewart's eloquent survey of the abolitionist movement is also a superb analysis of how the antislavery movement reinforced and transformed the dominant features of pre-Civil War America...read more

Product Description: In recognition of the bicentennial of the Constitution of the United States, former chief justice Warren E. Burger, Justice Antonin Scalia, ACLU president Norman Dorsen, and others delivered papers at the first annual DeWitt Wallace Conference on the Liberal Arts, held at Macalester College, St...read more