Contesting slavery: the politics of bondage and freedom in the new American nation

Recent scholarship on slavery and politics between 1776 and 1840 has whollyrevised historians' understanding of the problem of slavery in American politics.

Contesting Slavery builds on the best of that literature to reexamine thepolitics of slavery in revolutionary America and the early republic.The originalessays collected here analyze the Revolutionary era and the early republic on their own terms toproduce fresh insights into the politics of slavery before 1840.

The collection forces historians torethink the multiple meanings of slavery and antislavery to a broad array of Americans, from freeand enslaved African Americans to proslavery ideologues, from northern farmers to northern femalereformers, from minor party functionaries to political luminaries such as HenryClay.The essays also delineate the multiple ways slavery sustained conflict andconsensus in local, regional, and national politics.

In the end, ContestingSlavery both establishes the abiding presence of slavery and sectionalism in Americanpolitical life and challenges historians' long-standing assumptions about the place,meaning, and significance of slavery in American politics between the Revolutionary and antebellumeras.

Contributors: Rachel Hope Cleves, University of Victoria* David F.

Ericson, George Mason University * John Craig Hammond, Penn State University, NewKensington * Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University * Richard Newman, Rochester Instituteof Technology * James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center * Peter S.

Onuf, University of Virginia* Robert G. Parkinson, Shepherd University * Donald J. Ratcliffe, University of Oxford *Padraig Riley, Dalhousie University * Edward B.

Rugemer, Yale University * Brian Schoen,Ohio University * Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University, Camden * George William Van Cleve,University of Virginia * Eva Sheppard Wolf, San Francisco State University