Journal of Southern History

Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free-Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War is a revised and expanded essay based on the Eugenia Dorothy Blount Lamar Lectures delivered by Jonathan Daniel Wells at Mercer University in 2017. Wells places fugitives from enslavement at the center of an emerging re-exploration of causes of the secession crisis and the outbreak of the Civil War. Drawing on the work of Stanley Harrold, Manisha Sinha, Richard J. M. Blackett, and others, Wells argues that fugitives from enslavement exacerbated the sectional conflict by demonstrating the impossibility of creating a clear division between a slaveholding South and a free North. Decades of escapes and subsequent fugitive resistance to kidnapping and rendition undermined the compromises over slavery embedded in the Constitution. Continual violence in northern communities and the moral example of Black [End Page 125] resistance forced increasing numbers of white northerners to confront their complicity in the slave system, which led to the growth of a free-soil identity, a new political consciousness that perceived southern attempts to enforce slavery on northern soil as aggressive and threatening. Stiffening interracial resistance to renditions and kidnappings led to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which merely poured oil on the growing fire. A cycle of aggressive enforcement of the law and broad and violent resistance pounded away at sectional divisions and broke the Unionist consensus that governed the country under the second party system. A growing dedication to states’ rights ideology among northern defenders of free soil emboldened southern fire-eaters. By 1860, sectional alienation had reached a point where the South proved unwilling to live under a government led by the Republican Party, and the North proved unwilling to let the South go.

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. His narrative would, however, benefit from greater attention to geography and to the details of the violent incidents he describes. Wells asserts that kidnapping was widespread throughout the North, but all of his examples come from the northern borderland and even from slave states. He describes an attempt to rescue Thomas Sims in 1851 and a violent fugitive rescue in Detroit as responses to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. There were plans to rescue Sims, but no attempt took place, and the rescue in Detroit he refers to dates from 1833.

More important, Wells conflates higher law ideology with states’ rights. Though both are strains of nullification sentiment, they are distinct ideas. There is little evidence that states’ rights had become the dominant strain of antislavery nullification even by the late 1850s. Furthermore, articulation of the higher law did not signal a repudiation of the Constitution. It was largely compatible with the various strains of antislavery constitutionalism emerging in the 1840s.

Finally, Wells argues that the growth of free-soil identity explains the North’s decision for war. In fact, it explains disunion. The burden of Wells and other scholars advancing this narrative is that they must now offer a new and better explanation of the North’s decision for war.