xv, 540 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., maps ; 24 cm.
Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. [440]-519) and index.
Contents
Beginnings: 1800 to 1830 -- Connections: The 1830s -- Confrontation: The 1840s -- Victory: The 1850s.
Summary
Against a backdrop of the country's westward expansion, which brought together Easterners who had engaged in slavery primarily in the abstract alongside slaveholding Southerners and their slaves, arose a clash of values that evolved into a fierce fight for nothing less than the country's soul. Beginning six decades before the Civil War, freedom-seeking blacks and pious whites worked together to save tens of thousands of lives, often at the risk of great physical danger to themselves. Not since the American Revolution had the country engaged in an act of such vast and profound civil disobedience that not only subverted federal law but also went against prevailing mores.Flawlessly researched and uncommonly engaging, Bound for Canaan, shows why it was the Underground Railroad and not the Civil Rights movement that gave birth to this country's first racially-integrated, religiously-inspired movement for social change. [from the publisher]
