In part four of our episode on Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation we review the causes of the Civil War, and the momentous events of the 1850s, especially the Fugutive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision, which rallied northern opinion against the expansion of slavery, and the southerners who insisted on that expansion--even into the North.

Part 4: The War to Expand Slavery

Audio Clips:

• Richard Blackett, “The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law,” talk given to the The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkzMFXlyjqo&t=164s

 

Musical Clips:

• “Early in the Mornin’,” Prisoners of Parchman Farm, Louisiana (1947): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsiYfk5RV_Q

Bibliography:

• David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis (Harper, 1976)
• Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford, 1970)
• Richard Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and Politics of Slavery (Cambridge Press, 2018)
• Andrew Delbanco,The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (Penguin, 2018)