Slavery In The United States
Story Stream
African Founders, American Liberty September 13, 2022
Anyone who sets out to write a history of slavery in America must walk a thin and perilous line between affirmation and denial. When Stanley Elkins published Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life in 1959, he compared the ...
Calling on Lincoln June 28, 2022
Jonathan W. White's A House Built by Slaves steps into the debate about Abraham Lincoln’s attitudes and policies toward African Americans. What was Lincoln’s disposition toward African Americans? Did he think of them as moral, political, or social eq...
Frederick Douglass: The Agitator as Statesman January 05, 2022
“In this and like communities,” Abraham Lincoln observed, “public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public…...
Taking Down Abraham Lincoln September 18, 2021
Within the context of the events taking place during his lifetime, Thomas Jefferson comes off as the prudent voice of reason and statesmanship. Given the situation as it was, Monticello could have been a worse place. Certainly the slaves “rescued” by...
Ralph Waldo Emerson Would Hate Twitter August 13, 2021
We can’t understand Ralph Waldo Emerson the philosopher of self-realisation without understanding Emerson the radical abolitionist. In fact, his language and philosophy helped shape the contours of the antislavery movement in New England. As Bostonia...
Was the Constitution a Pro-Slavery Document? January 29, 2021
It was not long after the federal Constitution was created in 1787 that many antislavery Northerners began labeling it a pro-slavery document. Parts of it did support slavery — the clause that counted a slave as three-fifths of a person, which gave t...
American Heretic, American Burke January 29, 2021
There are some biographies which are almost impossible to write. Sometimes this is because the subject is guilty of such monstrosities that the empathy required to write a worthwhile biography can undermine the moral judgment a difficult subject dema...
Dismantling the 1619 Project December 01, 2020
When the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project hit the streets in August 2019, people in the City rushed to the newstands to get copies. The Project claimed to reframe American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy. The intr...
