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Book: The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War
Quotes of Book: The War Before the War:
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  1. Andrew Delbanco _ The War Before the War:

    Southerners who had insisted on states' rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights.
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  2. Andrew Delbanco _ The War Before the War:

    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.
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  3. Andrew Delbanco _ The War Before the 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."
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