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  • The American Scholar

    The Runaway Question

    Sep 04, 2018 4 minutes
    Review by Louis P. Masur

    THE WAR BEFORE THE WAR: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

    BY ANDREW DELBANCO

    Penguin, 464 pp., $30

    TRY AS THEY DID to define people as property, early American slaveholders knew that the enslaved had volition. Not surprisingly, various measures over the decades required that bonded laborers be restored to their owners, but although many people supported these laws, others resisted them. Runaway slaves forced Americans to take sides. As Andrew Delbanco shows in this wide-ranging, thought-provoking volume, slaves who sought to self-emancipate via escape transformed the law, politics, and culture of the

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