Gender Race and Politics in the New Nation Term Paper

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Race and Revolution is a voluminous examination of the revolutionary generation's early efforts to rectify the apparent contradiction of slavery and of their ultimate compromises that not only left the institution intact, but provided it with the protection of a vastly strengthened government after 1788. "Race and Revolution" by Gary Nash describes the free black community's response to this failure of the revolution's promise, its vigorous and articulate pleas for justice, and the community's successes in building its own African-American institutions within the hostile environment of early nineteenth-century America.

The North and upper South were, as we know, the main theaters of abolitionism. Gradual legislated emancipation characterized northern attempts at eradicating chattel bondage while private (and limited) manumission characterized southern discomfort with the peculiar institution. We today need to understand how white economic interest and white abhorrence of the notion of freed slaves mingling on an equal standing with whites dashed revolutionary idealism, thus leaving the issue of slavery to another generation. This lesson of ideology facing off against economic interest and entrenched attitudes provides a weighty lesson for modern day students of history to consider. The first two essays of this author's Race and Revolution discuss this and provide primary documents for discussion on the rise and decline of abolitionism.

Gary Nash's careful interweaving of the primary documents with his secondary analysis is one of the most successful ventures of "Race and Revolution." The primary documents lend a lively and personal aspect to what is generally more antiseptic critical review of history during the remainder of his work.

Although voluminous and all-encompassing, the actual historical survey in "Race and Revolution" does not provide an absolutely unique perspective.

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However, the primary documents do -- there, Nash gives readers a first-rate opportunity to gaze into the lives of both the abolitionists and those who opposed them. Unfortunately, there is largely lacking any primary documents of worth describing the slaves' perspectives on the movement.

Two aspects of abolition ought to stick in readers' minds through examining Gary Nash's "Race and Revolution." First, the freeing of slaves was not always benevolent, a simple case of morality transcending economic interest. Moreover, freedom came by degrees for emancipated slaves. They did not move from abject slavery to the light of freedom as if moving across the dark side of a river to the bright side. Legal emancipation did not confer full political rights, equal economic opportunity, or social recognition. All of that was denied and contested. Second, abolition was not engineered solely by high-minded whites. It was also produced, especially in the North, by slaves who made it their business to run away and perfect insolence to the point that their masters found slavery more trouble than it was worth.

All of this is very well established and well documented in Nash's work. The primary documents truly establish that economics was, to a large degree, at the root of the abolitionist movement, not just morality or superior and more progressive understandings of humanity. Nash's secondary research does not thoroughly explore this concept, but that is unnecessary as his primary documentation performs the task more than adequately -- it performs it beautifully.

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