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As one southern-born antislavery activist later wrote, it was a "sad satire to call [the] States 'United,'" because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life while in the other it was fading or already gone. The founding fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold." --
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Andrew Delbanco |
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Fugitives from slavery ripped open the screen behind which America tried to conceal the reality of life for black Americans, most of whom lived in the South, out of sight and out of mind for most people in the North. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation putatively based on the principle of human equality was actually a prison house in which millions of..
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Andrew Delbanco |
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Southerners who had insisted on states' rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights.
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Andrew Delbanco |