Overview

With a fresh interpretation of African American resistance to kidnapping and pre–Civil War political culture, Blind No More sheds new light on the coming of the Civil War by focusing on a neglected truism: the antebellum free states experienced a dramatic ideological shift that questioned the value of the Union. Jonathan Daniel Wells explores the cause of disunion as the persistent determination on the part of enslaved people that they would flee bondage no matter the risks. By protesting against kidnappings and fugitive slave renditions, they brought slavery to the doorstep of the free states, forcing those states to recognize the meaning of freedom and the meaning of states’ rights in the face of a federal government equally determined to keep standing its divided house. Through these actions, African Americans helped northerners and westerners question whether the constitutional compact was still worth upholding, a reevaluation of the republican experiment that would ultimately lead not just to Civil War but to the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery. Wells contends that the real story of American freedom lay not with the Confederate rebels nor even with the Union army but instead rests with the tens of thousands of self-emancipated men and women who demonstrated to the Founders, and to succeeding generations of Americans, the value of liberty.

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9780820354859

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Wells's explanation of the growth of free-soil identity in the North and the centrality of fugitives in that process is accurate, important, and clearer than a number of recent attempts by other scholars. That is a praiseworthy accomplishment.--Robert Churchill Journal of Southern History

Author Information

Jonathan Wells is a social, cultural, and intellectual historian interested in the literary, cultural, and political evolution of nineteenth-century America. He is the author or editor of ten books and has been invited to present his work to audiences across the US and internationally. He delivered the 2017 Lamar Lectures at Mercer University on the coming of the Civil War. Wells's first book, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (UNC Press, 2004), examined the fluid movement of ideas, literature, and people back and forth across the Mason-Dixon Line, a previously unexplored facet of early America that facilitated the emergence of a professional and merchant class amidst slavery. This monograph, the first to challenge the notion that class divisions and capitalism defined the South only after slavery had been abolished, shifted a long-standing paradigm in the history of antebellum America. This interest in the relationship between slavery and capitalism has led Wells to a new and exciting book project on self-emancipated African Americans (and the slavecatchers who pursued them) who straddled the thin line between slavery and freedom in the antebellum North. Titled The New York Kidnapping Club, this new book will explore the complicated ways in which ideas about enslavement and freedom competed for public support in northern communities like New York, debates that profoundly shaped politics and culture in the North and the coming of the Civil War. Finally Wells is also the previous editor of The Journal of the Early Republic, is currently the president of the Organization for the Study of Southern Economy, Culture, and Society, and has served a range of colleges and universities in administrative capacities.

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