How fugitive slaves exposed the idea of the 'United' States as a lie

The War Before the War

Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul From the Revolution to the Civil War

Andrew Delbanco

Penguin Press

453 pages; $30

Despite its title, Andrew Delbanco’s The War Before the War isn’t so much about confrontation as it is about the earnest, and often self-defeating, methods used to avoid it.

Mr Delbanco chose to focus his account on fugitive slaves because their plight, he says, “exposed the idea of the ‘united’ states as a lie.” From the beginning of the Republic the slave system was embedded in the Constitution, even if the framers declined to name it as such. Mr Delbanco highlights the especially tortured syntax of the fugitive slave clause (Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3) to show how the founding document, “so filled with euphemism and circumlocution,” was littered with bombshells.

The sentence-long clause starts out convoluted enough — “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof” — before going on for another few dozen words of passive legalese to declare that slaves who escape even to free states will never be free.

Abraham Lincoln wanted to believe that the conspicuous absence of the words “slavery” and “slave” in the Constitution signalled a profound and principled discomfort; the framers, he insisted, treated slavery like a “cancer” that one “hides away” in order to eliminate it “at the end of a given time.” But by hiding it, they also protected it. The cancer metastasised. Not even a hundred years after its founding, the US was embroiled in the Civil War.

So much has been written about antebellum America that little of the information in this book is new; the light it sheds, however, most definitely is. Mr Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia, excavates the past in ways that illuminate the present. 

As the author of a biography of Melville, among other books, Mr Delbanco is a close reader of literature and primary documents, often to revealing effect. Hypocrisy can reside, like the devil, in the details. Mr Delbanco shows how Thomas Jefferson, not long before proclaiming “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, posted an advertisement in the Virginia Gazette offering a reward for an escaped slave of his named Sandy, whom Jefferson peevishly described as “artful and knavish” and “inclining to corpulence.” 

The fugitive slave clause might have been enshrined in the Constitution, but it initially proved difficult to enforce. In the early days of the United States, the federal government was weak; the bigger the country became, the bigger and more permeable became the boundary between North and South. Northern legislatures, for their part, passed “personal liberty” laws to make it harder for slaveholders to recover their runaways.

Southern apologists for slavery, who liked to talk about “happy slaves,” had to devise ever more labyrinthine theories to explain why such happy people were so determined to escape. One Louisiana physician coined the term “drapetomania,” from the Greek words for “runaway” and “madness,” to diagnose “a disease of the mind” that “induces the Negro to run away from service.” More common was the enraged accusation that deceitful Northerners colluded with “slave stealers” and inveigled slaves to flee.

Mr Delbanco depicts a republic that kept facing the problem of white supremacy and kept electing to punt. Sometimes this involved outright haggling, as in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. But the subject of slavery was so incendiary that in 1836 the House of Representatives implemented a “gag rule,” whereby any antislavery petitions would be tabled automatically without debate.

The antebellum South was tantamount to a rich, expanding, authoritarian power — what the historian Sven Beckert has called “a kind of Saudi Arabia of the early 19th century.” And as much as Northerners wanted to cast slavery as a Southern sickness, the North had long benefited from the slave system too, supplying the capital and processing the raw materials extracted by slave labour into textiles and sugary treats. 

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 deepened the connections as well as the divisions between North and South, as the federal government assumed responsibility for recovering runaway slaves and demanded that the Northern states cooperate. The law denied habeas corpus to captives, rendering even free black people in the North vulnerable to slave catchers. Mr Delbanco accepts that a string of precipitating events in the ensuing decade may have hastened the Civil War — the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision that denied citizenship rights to black people, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry — but he argues that the Fugitive Slave Act “launched the final acceleration of sectional estrangement.”

The War Before the War makes a few pointed comparisons to our current moment, though Mr Delbanco emphasises that, by the truly bloody standards of antebellum lawmaking, which included the vicious beating of the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, our politics are a veritable “model of decorum.”

Still, as he lucidly shows, it was in the name of avoiding conflict that the nation was brought to the brink and into the breach. As early as 1827, the editors of Freedom’s Journal, one of the country’s first black newspapers, warned that all the deflecting and deferring could only sustain a terrible accommodation for so long. “National sins,” they wrote, “have always been followed by national calamities.”

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