Eighty-Eight Years

June 8, 2015
The U.S. took “far longer” to abolish slavery than did any other New World society, asserts Bowdoin College historian Rael as he examines this process through a temporally long and spatially broad framework in this meticulously researched study. The 88 years of the title signal the beginning and end points of the American struggle against slavery, from 1777, when “Vermont wrote slavery out of its constitution,” to 1865, when Congress ratified the 13th Amendment, abolishing the practice in perpetuity. Rael emphasizes the extent to which the American experience was unique and what it shared with other slaveholding societies of the Americas. While some elements of this story, particularly the rise of popular abolitionism in the 1830s, are likely to be familiar, Rael illuminates the revolutionary and early national context from which these events arose, showing how the new nation struggled to “preserve the privileges of racial caste... in a land where all men were alleged to have been created equal.” By examining forms of pro- and anti-slavery activism from multiple perspectives, and by focusing attention on the slaves as well as those who advocated on their behalf, Rael adds detail and nuance to a story with which readers might have believed themselves already well acquainted. Illus.

June 1, 2015

Rael (history, Bowdoin Coll.; Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North), a specialist on African American protest, now provides both a panoramic perspective and a microscopic analysis of the varied ways that slavery "died" or was eliminated in the western hemisphere, especially in the United States. By adopting a comparative view of the many forms of slavery and responses to it, adapted over time in the Atlantic world, Rael demonstrates the unfortunate uniqueness of American slavery in its energy, expansiveness, and encompassing nature as well as in the power slaveholders wielded in government. The author is particularly insightful in demonstrating the way in which all who resisted the practice had to understand the dynamics and directions of slaveholders' interests in order to counter them with effective means of organizing, communicating, and politicking. The result is a "long history" of slavery that reveals how nothing was inevitable about its death and that there is much to learn about its enduring strength. VERDICT Rael's study offers a way to understand how and why slavery thrives in new forms across the world today.--Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

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Starred review from May 1, 2015
Rael (History/Bowdoin Coll.; Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North, 2002, etc.) examines the long, slow death of slavery in the United States, masterfully showing how each event is connected and letting us in on secrets that textbooks never mentioned. As he tracks the history of abolition from the founding until the end of the Civil War, the author refutes long-held theories with logical, well-researched ones. For example, Georgia and the Carolinas never threatened to reject the Constitution. It would have been suicide, since the Spanish to their south and the Creek Indians to the west threatened them. It is often said that slavery would have died a natural death if left alone. Not at all true, writes Rael; the invention of the cotton gin expanded the cotton industry, requiring even more slaves and more land. What fueled the run-up to the Civil War was a fight to establish slavery in the expanding U.S. The Missouri Compromise was ruled unconstitutional by the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which not only required the slave's return, but also declared that the federal government had no right to outlaw slavery in any territory. The author rightly states that the turmoil surrounding the three-fifths compromise became the true basis of the conflict. It empowered the slave states in representation, in judicial appointments, and in the Electoral College, giving them the power to block legislation. Rael enlightens us on the wide differences in slavery throughout the New World and its ending through the Caribbean and Latin America, and he effectively shows the difficulties of emancipation, reconstruction, and the pervading white supremacy of the North. There are not enough superlatives to describe the wealth of information in this book and the bright, clear way in which it is taught. Just buy it.

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