Morris County - Morris Twp - The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War
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Thursday, May 23 – Morris County
North Jersey Civil War Round Table
7:14 PM at the Haggerty Education Center at the Frelinghuysen Arboretum, 353 E. Hanover Avenue, Morris Twp. (opp. the Morris County Library).
Admission - $5. Members & Students – free. NPS Rangers – free
Columbia University Prof. Andrew Delbanco will receive the 2019 North Jersey Civil War Round Table Book Award for The War Before the War: The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.
Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize. A New York Times Critics’ Best Book of 2018
This is the devastating story of how fugitive slaves drove the nation to Civil War. For decades after its founding, America was really two nations–one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the “united” states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was, in fact, a prison-house in which millions of Americans had no rights at all. By awakening northerners to the true nature of slavery, and by enraging southerners who demanded the return of their human “property,” fugitive slaves forced the nation to confront the truth about itself.
