The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

In this volume, the author explores how the Haitian Revolution respectively terrified and inspired white and black Americans, hovering over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost, and he offers an analysis of the complex and misunderstood significance of colonization--the project to move freed slaves back to Africa--to members of both races and all political persuasions. He portrays the dehumanizing impact of slavery, as well as the generally unrecognized importance of freed slaves to abolition. Most of all, the author presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.