Chapter 1 describes the lives of antebellum women and the forms of politics that were socially acceptable before the Civil War in order to demonstrate how 1860 was markedly different from 1859. It explains women’s defense of slavery as well as their reactions to South Carolina’s past slave rebellions, then describes how John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was tied to and augmented this fear of insurrection. South Carolina women’s politics during the Nullification Crisis are explored to both make connections to women during secession and demonstrate how Nullifier women faced criticism for being political. The Nullification Crisis, slave rebellions, and John Brown’s raid eventually faded from women’s writings and they returned to antebellum life, an action they were not able to take in 1860.

This chapter considers literary expressions of sovereignty in the nineteenth-century United States that underscore sovereignty’s oppositional nature and its productive potential, and it demonstrates how these literary expressions were, like public argument about sovereignty, constructed through the interplay between law and religion. Religious discourse provided a set of terms, examples, and motifs that shaped the nineteenth-century debate over political autonomy as it ranged across matters of territorial possession and the individual conscience. I first briefly address ideas of sovereignty that circulated in the long nineteenth century and informed US literature and public argument. Then I turn to competing visions of sovereignty expressed by the Cherokee Nation, the state of Georgia, the US federal government, and the US Supreme Court in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the final section, I briefly turn to the figure of John Brown who, in linking the vision of Indigenous sovereignty expressed by the Cherokee Nation to the sovereign individuality espoused by Henry David Thoreau and the Transcendentals, serves as a harbinger of the contests over political sovereignty that ultimately led to the US Civil War.

This is the great turning point in Emerson’s life. The chapter starts with a comparison to William Ellery Channing’s heroic arc of antislavery activism. Despite dying before the annexation of territories from Mexico that galvanized abolitionism, Channing, starting as a moderate like Emerson, progressed dramatically in his commitment. Where was Emerson in all this? (See Chapter 2.) Suddenly, in 1856 Emerson pivots and from then on rises spectacularly in the abolitionist world. Not because of violence done to Black bodies, but because of violence done to his White friend Charles Sumner and to White settlers in Kansas. The chapter analyzes why Emerson had contempt for most abolitionists and how he became one himself without the characteristics of those whom he disdained. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is an important text here. He used him as an example of someone undergoing a “soft” conversion.

Chapter 5 studies the “problem of evil.” Violence is a learned behavior; peaceful interventions and de-escalation disrupt the learning cycles of violence. By 1859, Black and White abolitionists had been attempting to bring about peaceful interventions to stop slavery since the nation’s founding. But southern slaveholders were not going to give up their slave property. In the Civil War enslavers refused President Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation (being paid market price per slave in exchange for setting slaves free) time and again. This is the problem of evil. How does one disrupt a violent institution when, in this case, slaveholders refused peaceful means of abolishing it? John Brown understood this dynamic and he challenged the greatest enabler of slavery in the United States, the federal government. This chapter explores understandings of Black violence and Black authority (threats to the hostile differences of liberal society), the legal mechanisms used to deploy troops against slave uprisings, and interprets Brown’s interracial Virginia attack as an attempt to fashion a government that backs the enslaved over the slaveholder.

Chapter 4 focuses on democracy, specifically the creation of a violent American political process. By the 1840s, the right to vote expanded to include nearly all White men in the United States. The establishment of this racialized and gendered space put the nation at the global forefront of White male political participation. These voters elected militant candidates, used violence to set boundaries around the electorate, and physically intimidated political opponents. They demonstrated the import of Whiteness and violence to democratic development. The chapter covers Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the election of 1828, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, and Bleeding Kansas.

Rochester, New York, was home to a diverse community of abolitionists beginning in the 1830s. Douglass met these black and white activists when he lectured there in the early 1840s and moved to Rochester in 1847 when he launch the North Star. He and his family made their home in Rochester for the next quarter century. Douglass’s presence helped strengthen the local abolition movement, attracted national and international activists and fugitive slaves to the city, and assured his place in the women’s rights movement that emerged in the late 1840s. Yet Douglass also contributed to fracturing local and regional antislavery ranks in the 1850s. The speeches Douglass gave in Rochester, his writings in the North Star and his correspondence, especially between 1845 and 1861, reveal the ways that the changing dynamics of abolition and its sister movements were embedded in local circles and circumstances as well as national networks and developments.

This chapter shows how Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Parker used historical distance in their responses to Dred Scott. Parker tied the idea of the Constitution as the act of the ratifiers to the right of the people as interpreters. He believed that the founding generation’s expectation of abolition warranted a progressive popular reading. Lincoln insisted that the framers had used caution to word the Constitution in such a way that slavery would disappear from the American past once their descendants abolished the institution. That the Slave Power had obscured that expectation made it even more important to work towards its realization. Douglass also placed emphasis on the framers’ emancipationist expectations. He distinguished original antislavery meaning from obscuring post-founding-era construction and trusted that Americans would notice the distinction and then use the Constitution to usher in a new era of freedom. The slavery debates forced interpreters to confront historical distance, and Parker, Lincoln, and Douglass used it to insist on radically new readings of the Constitution. Historical distance had become an interpretive force in antebellum America.

This chapter examines the transitions in Black intellectual thought at the turn of the century. It charts the shifts in W. E. B. Du Bois’s thinking, not in isolation, but as a member of a Black intellectual elite who were grappling with the same questions and challenges regarding the role of the Black intellectual. The chapter shows that Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and others saw their academic training as intimately connected with efforts to advance racial understanding and challenge the ideological bases of white supremacy. Rereading Du Bois’s pre-1900 work and the transition in his thinking that Du Bois himself attributed to the horrific lynching of Sam Hose in 1899, the chapter reveals how Du Bois’s thinking shifted over the course of the decade from a commitment to historical method and fact-finding to a more activist and militant approach that would take roots through his work on his John Brown biography, published in 1909, and eventually finding expression in the founding of the NAACP that same year.

Cody Marrs’s “The Civil War in African American Memory” considers the ways in which African American writers in the wake of emancipation tried to answer the question “How should one remember a revolution that was never allowed to complete itself?” During Reconstruction, Marrs argues, two forms of emancipationist memory emerged. On the one hand, many African Americans saw the Civil War as a historical rupture, a break that required commemoration; on the other hand, many saw it as a historical link, part of a longer and enduring struggle for liberation. Marrs retraces how these views of the war took shape in African American life-writings, periodicals, poems, and speeches that used emancipationist memory to reframe the world remade by the Abolition War. That tendency to turn back to the past to apprehend the present, he argues, is the defining feature of African American memory of the war during this period, and it is what ultimately ties these two commemorative modes together, revealing the war to be both an act and a process, an event as well as an ongoing struggle.

In the wake of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, free African Americans felt they had as much to lose as fugitive slaves. Many felt that they would never be recognized as citizens and that they would never be granted legal equality or social acceptance in the predominantly white United States. This chapter shows that, against this backdrop, free-soil havens abroad resonated more than ever as potent symbols of liberty, equality, uplift, and independence. They offered a stark contrast to the United States’ ongoing commitment to slavery at its very highest levels. Building on decades of practice, American anti-slavery advocates in the 1850s leveraged the practical and symbolic value of international free-soil havens to bolster the fight of freedom and equality at home and abroad. From national anti-slavery conventions to burgeoning black nationalist political thought, this chapter shows that free-soil spaces became dominant focal points of escape, resistance, and collective action until the outbreak of civil war in 1861.

An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (2 vols., 1757–8) by John Brown (1715–66) has rarely been studied in depth by intellectual historians, incongruent to its own initial popularity at publication. The Estimatewas written in a declinist voice, following hard on the heels of Britain’s defeat by France at the Battle of Minorca in 1756. Brown was convinced that Britain’s initial bad fortunes in war against France were related to a general decline in manners and principles, exemplified by the spirit of party. Even more understudied is Brown’s final contribution on the subject: his Thoughts on Civil Liberty: On Licentiousness and Faction, published in 1765, one year before he committed suicide. In this work, Brown tried to do what many political writers, including the principal ones discussed in this book, had held to be impossible: to demonstrate how a free state could exist without the internal conflict exemplified by party.

Mary Ellen Pleasant was a free black woman entrepreneur in California and a pioneer of black philanthropy. During her ninety years of life, she worked on the Underground Railroad and helped to usher in California’s Gold Rush. She is perhaps most famous for using her enormous financial resources to assist John Brown in his raid on Harpers Ferry. Her continued efforts of racial equality in the West led her to be known as “The Mother of Human Rights in California.” When Pleasant and two African American women were kicked off a street car in San Francisco, she filed suits. Her case, Pleasant v. North Beach & Mission Railroad Company, went to the California Supreme Court. After two years of litigation, the city outlawed segregation in San Francisco’s public transportation. This paper places her efforts squarely in the center of America’s greatest turning points. Time and time again we see how black women, and in particular, Mary Ellen Pleasant, cannot be separated from the endorsement of American entrepreneurship, abolitionism, and human rights.