The astonishing transformation of the abolitionist movement during the Civil War proved enormously consequential both for the cause of abolitionism in general and for the nation. Drawing on a cast of famous and obscure figures from Frederick Douglass to Moncure Conway, Frank J. Cirillo's The Abolitionist Civil War explores how antislavery reformers, including those who supported the immediate abolition of the enslaved, contorted their arguments and clashed with each other as they labored over the course of the conflict to create a more perfect Union. Cirillo reveals that immediatists' efforts to forge a morally transformed nation that enshrined emancipation and Black rights shaped contemporary debates surrounding abolitionism but ultimately did little to promote racial justice for African Americans.

Before the Civil War, Oberlin, Ohio, stood in the vanguard of the abolition and black freedom movements. The community, including co-founded Oberlin College, strove to end slavery and establish full equality for all. Yet, in the half-century after the Union victory, Oberlin's resolute stand for racial justice eroded as race-based discrimination pressed down on its African American citizens. In Elusive Utopia, noted historians Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser tell the story of how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Oberlin residents, black and white, understood and acted upon their changing perceptions of race, ultimately resulting in the imposition of a color line. Founded as a utopian experiment in 1833, Oberlin embraced radical racial egalitarianism in its formative years. By the eve of the Civil War, when 20 percent of its local population was black, the community modeled progressive racial relations that, while imperfect, shone as strikingly more advanced than in either the American South or North. Emancipation and the passage of the Civil War amendments seemed to confirm Oberlin's egalitarian values. Yet, contrary to the expectations of its idealistic founders, Oberlin's residents of color fell increasingly behind their white peers economically in the years after the war. Moreover, leaders of the white-dominated temperance movement conflated class, color, and respectability, resulting in stigmatization of black residents. Over time, many white Oberlinians came to view black poverty as the result of personal failings, practiced residential segregation, endorsed racially differentiated education in public schools, and excluded people of color from local government. By 1920, Oberlin's racial utopian vision had dissipated, leaving the community to join the racist mainstream of American society. Drawing from newspapers, pamphlets, organizational records, memoirs, census materials and tax lists, Elusive Utopia traces the rise and fall of Oberlin's idealistic vision and commitment to racial equality in a pivotal era in American history.

Divided Hearts explores the passionate political strife that raged in Britain as a result of the American Civil War. Moving beyond Mary Ellison's 1972 landmark regional study of Lancashire cotton workers' reactions, R. J. M. Blackett opens the subject to a new, wider transatlantic context of influence and undertakes a deftly researched and written sociological, intellectual, and political examination of who in Britain supported the Union, who the Confederacy, and why.

Blackett argues that the traditional historiographical assessments of British partisanship along class and economic lines must be reevaluated in light of the nature and changing contours of transatlantic abolitionist connections, the ways in which nationalism framed the debate, and the effect that race -- among other issues -- exerted over the British public's perception of conditions in America. He conducts a detailed study of the meetings, lectures, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and other means that friends of the protagonists used to shape the public's view of the war. Both sides, he shows, operating on the assumption that in a democracy pressure from without can and frequently does sway the government's action, made every effort to win widespread support for their position.

The American Civil War had a profound effect on Britain's political culture; no other event during that period -- not in Poland, Hungary, Italy, or British colonies -- compared. "The Civil War in the United States affects our people more generally even than the Indian Mutiny", the London Times asserted in 1862. In his superb delineation of the arguments that British citizens of every rank employed to justify positions taken on the war, Blackettbroaches the provocative question of the degree to which this involvement redirected their gaze toward political reform at home, resulting in an extension of the franchise among other things. Divided Hearts presents a compelling and innovative thesis, one sure to engage scholars in many fields of history.

Husband and wife William and Ellen Craft's break from slavery in 1848 was perhaps the most extraordinary in American history. Numerous newspaper reports in the United States and abroad told of how the two -- fair-skinned Ellen disguised as a white slave master and William posing as her servant -- negotiated heart-pounding brushes with discovery while fleeing Macon, Georgia, for Philadelphia and eventually Boston. No account, though, conveyed the ingenuity, daring, good fortune, and love that characterized their flight for freedom better than the couple's own version, published in 1860, a remarkable authorial accomplishment only twelve years beyond illiteracy. Now their stirring first-person narrative and Richard Blackett's excellent interpretive pieces are brought together in one volume to tell the complete story of the Crafts.

In Building an Antislavery Wall, R. J. M. Blackett examines the efforts of black Americans in England to advance the cause of their own freedom. Speaking to enthusiastic working-class crowds in the cities and lobbying in the salons of the wealthy and aristocratic, black Americans used England as a forum to tell the world of their cruel plight in the United States, to expose what they saw as an oppressive slave society masquerading as the seat of democracy and freedom. It was their goal to create a moral cordon around the United States so that, in the words of Frederick Douglass, ""wherever a slaveholder went, he might hear nothing but denunciation of slavery, that he might be looked upon as a man-stealing, cradle-robbing, woman-stripping monster, and that he might see reproof and detestation on every hand."" The American blacks who visited England between 1830 and 1860 came there for various specific reasons- some to raise funds for projects at home, some to receive the education that they had been denied by American colleges, many for refuge from slave-catchers. But every black saw himself, at least to some extent, as an emissary from his enslaved brethren in America, and he was treated as such by British society. Some- Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany, for example- were already famous; others, like Henry ""Box"" Brown and James Watkins, would gain fame through their lecturing while in England. Some of the blacks who came to England were ministers; others were doctors, journalists, and authors of slave narratives. Clearly gifted and articulate individuals, these black Americans stood as living proof of slavery's unfairness, flesh-and-blood refutations of America's boasted freedom. Tracing the impact of the black Americans, Blackett concludes that they were very effective spokesmen who significantly advanced the cause of the Atlantic abolitionist movement. British support had monetary as well as symbolic value, and the popularity of the blacks as lecturers gave them a special edge in both fund-raising and proselytizing. At the same time, while organized white abolitionist societies expended much of their energy on sectarian disputes, the blacks sought to bridge these differences in the hope of marshaling the full weight of British opinion in their favor. The blacks played an especially important role, Blackett finds, in discrediting the American Colonization Society- their adamant opposition made it difficult for colonizationists to convince the British that their plan was in the blacks' best interest. Chronicling the efforts of black Americans to win international support for their struggles at home, Building an Antislavery Wall illuminates an important chapter in the history of American reform and in the emergence of an articulate black leadership in the United States.