Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004
America's Original Sin
By George M. Fredrickson
Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery
by David Brion Davis
Harvard University Press, 115 pp., $18.95
Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves
by Ira Berlin
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press,374 pp., $29.95
The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery
by Don E. Fehrenbacher, completed and edited by Ward M. McAfee
Oxford University Press, 466 pp., $19.95 (paper)
The institution of slavery has had a profound and lasting effect on American history. Virtually all historians now agree that sectional differences on the slavery issue caused the Civil War. Until the eve of that conflict the slaveholding interest was so economically and politically powerful as to appear virtually impregnable. No one could reasonably have predicted in 1860 that the emancipation of more than four million African-American slaves would come within five years. Nothing short of the needs and emotions aroused by the vast bloodletting required to preserve the Union could, in so short a time, have abolished an institution that had sunk such deep roots in America. Before the war, lawyers, politicians, clergymen, even physical anthropologists had defended it against a Northern abolitionist movement that had never gained much popular support. In Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery, his brief but incisive reflections on slavery in American and world history, David Brion Davis sums up the economic basis for the slaveholders' power in antebellum America:
Review, 3927 words
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