The War Before the War Quotes

“Fugitives from slavery ripped open the screen behind which America tried to conceal the reality of life for black Americans, most of whom lived in the South, out of sight and out of mind for most people in the North. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation putatively based on the principle of human equality was actually a prison house in which millions of Americans had virtually no rights at all. By awakening northerners to this grim fact, and by enraging southerners who demanded the return of their “absconded” property, fugitive slaves pushed the nation toward confronting the truth about itself. They incited conflict in the streets, the courts, the press, the halls of Congress, and perhaps most important in the minds and hearts of Americans who had been oblivious to their plight. This manifold conflict—under way long before the first shots were fired in the Civil War—was the war before the war.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“As one southern-born antislavery activist later wrote, it was a “sad satire to call [the] States ‘United,’” because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life while in the other it was fading or already gone. The founding fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Before dismissing such men as 'mediocre, timid, and weak,' one might ask oneself how many of us would welcome such a war, especially without the knowledge of hindsight?”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“To face this fact is to encounter one of the most demanding challenges in thinking about history: explaining how people in the past could have failed to see what seems so clear to us in retrospect. This is an imperative task but also a delicate and exacting one. On one hand, explanation can shade into excuse, on the other hand, passing judgment on the past can be a form of self-congratulation in the present.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Confronting this question takes us beyond a world where the line between good and evil is sharp and bright, into a gray confusion where navigation was soul-trying work.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Cutting to the heart of the matter, Lincoln made the irrefutable point: “People of any color seldom run, unless there be something to run from.” Two SLAVERY AND THE FOUNDERS 1.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Southerners who had insisted on states’ rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“And yet vile as it was, the fugitive slave law was also, ironically, a gift to antislavery activists, both black and white, because wherever it was enforced, it allowed them to show off human beings dragged back to the hell whence they came—a more potent aid to the cause than any speech or pamphlet.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“The rebellion was over, the Union restored, and after more than two centuries there was no more slavery from which to run. The vast work of repairing its human devastation had barely begun.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“The Douglass of the memoirs is a paragon. There is little trace in him of the man who sometimes must have been petty, impulsive and vain--not a piece of property to be utilized in one way or another but, as one putative friend complained, a "haughty" and "self-possessed' man with the low as well as exalted desires that constitute freedom. To pretend otherwise is to treat him once again as less than human.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Beecher described slavery as an 'organic sin,' by which he meant that a sing that permeates the body politic so completely that it cannot be cured by targeted excision but must be overwhelmed with an infusion of love.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Sixty years later, a child's primer titled The Anti-slavery Alphabet made the point in rhyme:

S is the sugar, that the slave
Is toiling hard to make,
To put into your pie and tea
Your candy and your cake”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Another fugitive, writing in the 1820s compared the sight of the whipped slave's black to that of 'a field lately ploughed' and proposed with scalding irony that 'if it were not for the stripes on my back' he would bequent his own skin to the government to be used as parchment wrapping for tht 'charter of American liberty' the US Constitution.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“We may stare in amazement at such descriptions of mutilated human beings, and wonder why, in a nation putatively dedicated to freedom, it took so long for passions over their fate to come to a boil. But given the horrors of our own time--millions of refugees abroad fleeing murderous violence only to drown or suffocate or be sold into sexual slavery; thousands in our own country held in jail or detention camps while awaiting deportations back to some form of servitude in the countries from which they fled--perhaps we ought also to ask this question of ourselves”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union, or (for Northerners) how to destroy slavery while preserving the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War