Slavery and the founders : race and liberty in the age of Jefferson / Paul Finkelman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Finkelman, Paul, 1949- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Slavery--Law and legislation--United States--History.

Slavery--Law and legislation.

United States.

History.

Slavery--United States--History.

Slavery.

Physical Description:

xii, 309 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

Third edition.

Place of Publication:

Armonk, New York : M.E. Sharpe, Inc., [2014]

Summary:

In this third edition of Slavery and. the Founders, including a new chapter on the regulation and eventual banning of the African slave trade, Paul Finkelman confronts a central issue of the American founding: how the first generation of leaders of the United States dealt with the profoundly important question of human bondage. The book explores the tension between the professed idea of America as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and the reality of the early American republic, reminding us of the ways that slavery influenced the writing of the Constitution and the development of early national politics and law. The book remains the most important short critique of Thomas Jefferson's relationship to slavery, and contrasts the way Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans approached the problem of slavery in the first thirty years after the Revolution. Book jacket.

Contents:

Making a covenant with death : slavery and the Constitutional Convention

Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance, 1787 : a study in ambiguity

Evading the Ordinance : the persistence of bondage in Indiana and Illinois

Implementing the proslavery constitution : the adoption of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793

Ending the African slave trade in the new nation

The problem of slavery in the age of federalism

"Treason against the hopes of the world" : Thomas Jefferson and slavery

Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and antislavery : historians and myths.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-294) and index.

ISBN:

0765641453

9780765641458

9780765641465

0765641461

OCLC:

862588735

Publisher Number:

99958585911