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Foreword Peter S. Onuf Slavery has shaped our national narrative. It has been the dark counterpoint to the progress of democracy, a stark reminder that the American Revolution ’s promise would long remain unfulfilled for many Americans. The juxtaposition between American slavery and American freedom has led recent generations of historians to subject the founding generation to relentless and penetrating criticism. Echoing antebellum opponents of slavery, modern critics turn the revolutionaries’ exalted professions—‘‘All men are created equal’’—against their sordid, self-interested practices. Revisionists thus simultaneously reject the Founders and identify with them, positioning themselves at the endpoint of the history the Founders envisioned. The Revolution enabled white Americans to pursue happiness and enjoy the benefits of self-government, but it also gave rise to a dynamic and expansive ‘‘empire of slavery.’’ A few idealistic Americans struggled to keep the Spirit of 1776 alive by redeeming the new nation from its original sin. Overcoming tremendous obstacles, including the great wealth slavery created for white Americans and racist Northerners’ indifference to the fate of bondsmen , the antislavery vanguard precipitated a great sectional conflict that destroyed the Union. The Civil War’s ‘‘new birth of freedom’’ initiated another century of fitful progress toward racial equality. Only now can the descendants of slaves begin to claim their full share of the freedom the Revolutionary fathers fought for. The conventional understanding of early American history has a history of its own, dating back to the Civil War. In 1859, as the sectional crisis deepened, Abraham Lincoln looked back to the American Revolution, offering a preliminary sketch of the new narrative. ‘‘All honor to Jefferson,’’ Lincoln wrote to correspondents in Springfield, the Illinois state capital. ‘‘In the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people,’’ the author of the Declaration of Independence ‘‘had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract xii Peter S. Onuf truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today , and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.’’∞ Jefferson’s eloquent assertion of natural rights principles cast a bright light across the generations, reaffirming the new nation’s purpose in world history. The Revolution had been fought to vindicate ‘‘abstract truths,’’ not to defend the revolutionaries’ contingent, ‘‘concrete’’ interests—including their ‘‘property’’ in slaves. Lincoln’s generation would honor the slaveholding fathers by setting slavery ‘‘in the course of an ultimate extinction.’’≤ Lincoln’s interpretation of the Revolutionary fathers’ intentions was profoundly and radically anachronistic, projecting the values of his own generation of Northern nationalists back to the Founding, and equating the Southern ‘‘slave power’’ with a despotic and corrupt imperial government. Southern secessionists returned the favor, of course, equating tyrannical ‘‘black Republicans’’ with their British prototypes. The inevitable result of these divergent interpretations was to read the history of previous decades as an extended prologue to a single great conflict over the meaning of the American Revolution. As they sought to explain and justify their ultimate descent into the violent maelstrom of civil war, Northerners and Southerners alike reaffirmed their fealty to Revolutionary principles. Telescoping the distance between the two great nation-making wars that defined the subsequent course of American history, these patriots—and succeeding generations of Americans and their historians—either overlooked the intervening decades or failed to interpret them on their own terms. Modern historians thus argue about the impact of Revolutionary values on the democratization of political and social life (for whites), or about the escalating conflicts that led to the coming of the Civil War, with the Age of Jackson providing the battleground for clashing historiographical perspectives.≥ In either case, the Revolution and Civil War have dominated—and continue to dominate—popular and scholarly understandings of early American history. The essays in this volume suggest that the time has come for rethinking the conventional narrative. Editors Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason take advantage of an extraordinary outpouring of excellent work on the history of slavery and antislavery in the early American republic to challenge the way we think about American history more generally. This new scholarship has begun to shift our focus away from the decades immediately preceding the Civil War to the generally neglected period after the Revolution when its idealism seemed to subside, cresting with the gradual end of slavery...

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