Andrew Delbanco, "The War Before The War"

Andrew Delbanco discusses his book, "The War Before The War", at Politics and Prose.
One of our premier public intellectuals, Delbanco, Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2012. In his new book, he examines the decades prior to the Civil War, when many northerners, not able to witness the conditions that slaves lived under in the South, chose to believe that slavery was a benign institution. Yet with slaves continually risking their lives to flee their masters, this notion was gradually revealed as a myth. Focusing on the 1850 Compromise, and especially its strengthening of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law, Delbanco traces the growing awareness of the gap between the nation’s ideals of equality and the realities of human bondage, shows how this moral evolution led to the Civil War, and outlines the larger history of the dilemma of knowing when to resist unjust laws.
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Produced by Tom Warren