Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award A New York Times Critics' Best Book of 2018 "Excellent... stunning."--Ta-Nehisi Coates The devastating story of how fugitive slaves drove the nation to Civil War For decades after its founding, America was really two nations--one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the "united" states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was in fact a prison-house in which millions of Americans had no rights at all. By awakening northerners to the true nature of slavery, and by enraging southerners who demanded the return of their human "property," fugitive slaves forced the nation to confront the truth about itself. By 1850, with America on the verge of collapse, Congress reached what it hoped was a solution-- the notorious Compromise of 1850, which required that fugitive slaves be returned to their masters. Like so many political compromises before and since, it was a deal by which white Americans tried to advance their interests at the expense of black Americans. Yet the Fugitive Slave Act, intended to preserve the Union, in fact set the nation on the path to civil war. It divided not only the American nation, but also the hearts and minds of Americans who struggled with the timeless problem of when to submit to an unjust law and when to resist. The fugitive slave story illuminates what brought us to war with ourselves and the terrible legacies of slavery that are with us still.

“[A] sweeping and fascinating book . . . a long, festering story of political disunion, mapped through many voices. . . . Delbanco writes lyrically . . . and with a genuine sense of tragedy . . . The War Before the War presents a clear narrative of the legal and political history of [how], self-tortured by the slavery question, a ‘nation’ descended into disunion.” —David Blight, New York Review of Books

“A valuable book, reflective as well as jarring . . . Delbanco, an eminent and prolific scholar of American literature, is well suited to recounting . . . the most violent and enduring conflict in American history.” —Sean Wilentz, New York Times Book Review

“Delbanco . . . excavates the past in ways that illuminate the present. He lucidly shows [how] in the name of avoiding conflict . . . the nation was brought to the brink and into the breach. This is a story about compromises—and a riveting, unsettling one at that.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
 
"Sweeping . . . stirring . . . Delbanco relates many thrilling escape-and-rescue episodes. . . . Well worth reading . . . for those interested in exploring the roots of today's social problems and learning about early efforts to resolve them.” —David Reynolds, Wall Street Journal
 
“Delbanco has written a compelling new synthesis about the cultural, social, and political ruptures around fugitivism leading up to the war. Moreover, Delbanco’s skills as a literature scholar give his work an advantage over other historians, integrating effective literary analysis into this political history . . . The War before the War will be particularly impactful because it grapples with literary, social, and political history, making it a useful new history of slavery and the sectional crisis.” —Early American Literature

“A compelling, elegantly written account of how fugitive slave laws laid bare ‘the moral crisis’ in the hearts and minds of antebellum Americans.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
“In The War Before the War, Andrew Delbanco narrates this history in lucid prose and with a moral clarity that is best described as terrifying . . . One of the most admirable features of this truly great book is the subtlety with which Delbanco considers his story’s applicability to our own moment.” —Alan Jacobs, The Weekly Standard

“Many present-day historians dealing with issues of race and slavery tend to approach the past as prosecuting attorneys eager to bring all those culprits in the past to justice. They indict some in the antebellum period for their timidity and caution because they feared a war and did not know what to do, and applaud others who turned out to guess right about the course of events. Delbanco has too subtle a sensibility, too fine an appreciation of the tragedy of life, for that crude kind of history writing. Although he describes the brutality of slavery with force and clarity, and his feelings about slavery are never in doubt, he nevertheless displays a compassion for all the people, slaveholders included, caught up in circumstances they could scarcely control or even fully comprehend.” —Gordon Wood, The New Republic

“[Delbanco] has performed a remarkable service in producing this deeply researched and heavily documented book. His literary style is flowing and graceful, well-balanced . . . This is truly an important book, and well-worth the time and effort to educate oneself in the source of a human tragedy whose far-reaching fingers still scratch upon our conscience.” —Richard Raymond, The Roanoke Times

“Cogently argued, meticulously researched, and compulsively readable, The War Before the War sheds new light not only on American history, but on America’s present story, and its struggles with race.” —*Read it Forward
 
“Andrew Delbanco’s latest book, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, is a richly detailed, thought-provoking and compelling chronicle of the role fugitive slaves played in widening the gap between America’s two distinct societies . . . Andrew Delbanco, who is a Columbia University professor, has written an engaging and most valuable account of America’s original sin.” —**Christian Science Monitor***

“Provocative, sweeping study of America's original sin—slavery—in the late 18th and early 19th centuries . . . Essential background reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the early republic and the Civil War.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Superb . . . A paramount contribution to the U.S. middle period historiography.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“This well-documented and valuable work makes clear how slavery shaped the early American experience with effects that reverberate today.” —Publishers Weekly

“Andrew Delbanco is one of our generation’s most gifted scholars and discerning, public intellectuals. In his astonishing new work, The War Before the War, he transforms the figure of the fugitive slave from the margins of American history to its dynamic center, demonstrating how their plight exposed the paradoxes in the soul of a nation torn between freedom and slavery, as it propelled to its greatest reckoning.  By rendering in such gripping detail that defining struggle of the 18th and 19th centuries, Delbanco reminds us of the stakes of moral testing in every generation, and how the agents of moral change often begin their journeys under the most desperate circumstances. The result is not only a brilliant historical analysis; it is also a source of strength for the road ahead—a long, hard road that stretches back to the founding of our great Republic. Th…