“Now and again, something happens that makes it almost impossible to do that.”One of those things happened in 1850, when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. In his new book, “The War Before the War,” Delbanco argues that disputes over the fates of fugitive slaves did much to accelerate the divisions that led to the Civil War. “The fugitive slave law was an important force in bringing the public and the personal together for more and more Americans, and thereby woke them up to the fact that this was an existential moral problem,” Delbanco says. “We’ve swabbed thousands and thousands of sites,” Dunn says of his team of researchers. “We’ve never swabbed a spot in a house or a hospital that isn’t full of life.”

Source: New York Times January 04, 2019 20:47 UTC