About this item
Why did it take so long to end slavery in the United States, and what did it mean that the nation existed eighty-eight years as a "house divided against itself," as Abraham Lincoln put it? The decline of slavery throughout the Atlantic world was a protracted affair, says Patrick Rael, but no other nation endured anything like the United States. Here the process took from 1777, when Vermont wrote slavery out of its state constitution, to 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery nationwide. Rael immerses readers in the mix of social, geographic, economic, and political factors that shaped this unique American experience. He not only takes a far longer view of slavery's demise than do those who date it to the rise of abolitionism in 1831, he also places it in a broader Atlantic context.
About the Author
Patrick Rael (Professor of History at Bowdoin College) is a specialist in African-American history (1995 Ph.D. in American History, University of California, Berkeley) , and the author of numerous essays and books, including Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (North Carolina, 2002) , which earned Honorable Mention for the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lerhman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is also the editor of African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North (Routledge, 2008) , and co-editor of Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature (Routledge, 2001) . His most recent book, Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865 (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming Summer 2015) , explores the Atlantic history of slavery to understand the exceptionally long period of time it took to end chattel bondage in America.
