Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free-Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells, and: “There Is a North”: Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War by John L. Brooke (review)

Front and center of most narratives of the coming of the American Civil War is the question of the expansion of chattel slavery as the nation added new territories and states in the West to the polity. The Missouri crisis, debates over Texas annexation, the status of southwestern lands absorbed after the Mexican-American War, and the controversies surrounding the Kansas-Nebraska Act are in the foreground of those narratives. Jonathan Daniel Wells’s Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free-Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War and John L. Brooke’s “There Is a North”: Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War both seek to shift the focus of our understanding of Civil War causation to a topic that, while not neglected by scholars of the sectional crisis, is usually presented as a codicil to the debates surrounding the expansion of slavery in the nation: the sectional tensions that were fed by conflicts over fugitives from slavery, especially those surrounding the draconian Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Wells and Brooke intend a similar historiographic intervention, wishing to highlight the way in which northern reactions to this hated law played a central role in bringing about the crisis that led to the fracturing of the United States and the eventual eradication of slavery in the nation, but they have very different approaches.

Wells’s book, which grew out of his 2017 Lamar Lectures at Mercer University, is briefer and bears the mark of its origins. The lecture series was established as part of the university’s southern studies program, and Wells’s original audience of those interested in southern history is evident in his book, which takes great pains to justify the importance of understanding shifts in northern opinion that contributed to the sectional breach as an alternative to the traditional emphasis on southern views that led to secession. He stresses the importance of recognizing northerners’ commitments to their own states’ rights ideology in protesting the forced return of fugitives from slavery, giving special attention to the role African Americans played in fostering these commitments. Wells’s case is built in chapters that discuss the conflicts along the North-South border that arose surrounding the kidnapping of African Americans from free soil to “return” them to slavery, the debates surrounding the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, resistance to the enforcement of that law, and the role that the fugitive slave issue played in eventual disunion.

Among these chapters, the most revealing is Wells’s first one, which deals with the kidnapping of northern blacks from so-called free soil into the slave-owning South along the thousand-mile border that extended from the East Coast into the newer western states. Wells posits that kidnapping was more rampant along this border than scholars have traditionally argued and that the issue of kidnapping was a more prominent one in sectional debates than previously considered. Wells describes the organized effort among slave traders to kidnap free blacks into slavery, and he discusses legal battles fought by northern African Americans to protect themselves. The kidnapping issue, he argues, illustrates the fact that there was no true “free soil” in the United States where African Americans could feel safe, and it highlights the active role African Americans played in bringing attention to this fact.

Later chapters in Wells’s book concentrate on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and its centrality in the...