In the 1980s, Willis McGlascoe Carter s handwritten memoir turned up unexpectedly in the hands of a midwestern antiques dealer. Its twenty-two pages told a fascinating story of a man born into slavery in Virginia who, at the onset of freedom, gained an education, became a teacher, started a family, and edited a newspaper. Even his life as a slave seemed exceptional: he described how his owners treated him and his family with respect, and he learned to read and write. Tucked into its back pages, the memoir included a handwritten tribute to Carter, written by his fellow teachers upon his...

Historians have long known that German immigrants provided much of the support for emancipation in southern Border States. Kristen Layne Anderson's Abolitionizing Missouri, however, is the first analysis of the reasons behind that opposition as well as the first exploration of the impact that the Civil War and emancipation had on German immigrants' ideas about race. Anderson focuses on the relationships between German immigrants and African Americans in St. Louis, Missouri, looking particularly at the ways in which German attitudes towards African Americans and the institution of slavery...

Throughout the Civil War era, no other white American spoke more powerfully against slavery and for the ideals of racial democracy than did Wendell Phillips. Nationally famous as abolition s golden trumpet, Phillips became the North s most widely hailed public lecturer, even though he espoused ideas most regarded as deeply threatening the abolition of slavery, equality among races and classes, and women's rights. James Brewer Stewart s study resolves this seeming paradox by showing how Phillips came to possess such extraordinary rhetorical gifts, how he used them to shape the politics of...