Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865 (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900) - Hardcover

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PATRICK RAEL is a professor of history at Bowdoin College and one of the general editors of the Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900 series. His books include Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North and African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North. Rael is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer, 2010–2015.

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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 in no other nation was it nearly as prolonged as in 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. Not only does he take 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. We see how slavery ended variously by consent or force across time and place and how views on slavery evolved differently between the centers of European power and their colonial peripheries–some of which would become power centers themselves.

Rael shows how African Americans played the central role in ending slavery in the United States. Fueled by new Revolutionary ideals of self-rule and universal equality, slaves and free blacks–both on their own and alongside abolitionists–slowly turned American opinion against the slave interests in the South. Secession followed, and then began the national bloodbath that would end in slavery’s complete destruction.

"Patrick Rael’s elegant prose wisely tells this narrative from a number of perspectives. Like all smart social historians, Rael understands that power cannot be ignored, and politicians on both sides of the Civil War are given voice in this important work."

–Douglas R. Egerton, author of Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War

PATRICK RAEL is a professor of history at Bowdoin College and one of the general editors of the Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900 series. His books includeBlack Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North and African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North. Rael is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer, 2010–2015.

Cover design: Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Cover illustration:

Author photo: Courtesy of the author

Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900

Published in cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in African American History

A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication

The University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

ISBN 978-0-8203-4839-1 (paper)