Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom

Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom by Peck, Graham A.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780252041365.

Winner of the Russell P. Strange Memorial Book Award This sweeping narrative presents an original and compelling explanation for the triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States prior to the Civil War. Abraham Lincolns election as the first antislavery president was hardly preordained. From the countrys inception, Americans had struggled to define slaverys relationship to freedom. Most Northerners supported abolition in the North but condoned slavery in the South, while most Southerners denounced abolition and asserted slaverys compatibility with whites freedom. On this massive political fault line hinged the fate of the nation. Graham A. Peck meticulously traces the conflict over slavery in Illinois from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to Lincolns defeat of his archrival Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election. Douglass attempt in 1854 to persuade Northerners that slavery and freedom had equal national standing stirred a political earthquake that brought Lincoln to the White House. Yet Lincolns framing of the antislavery movement as a conservative return to the countrys founding principles masked what was in fact a radical and unprecedented antislavery nationalism. It justified slaverys destruction but triggered the Civil War. Presenting pathbreaking interpretations of Lincoln, Douglas, and the Civil Wars origins, Making an Antislavery Nation shows how battles over slavery paved the way for freedoms triumph in America.