Free Men

From the author of the highly acclaimed The Story of Land and Sea comes a captivating novel, set in the late eighteenth-century American South, that follows a singular group of companions—an escaped slave, a white orphan, and a Creek Indian—who are being tracked down for murder. In 1788, three men converge in the southern woods of what is now Alabama. Cat, an emotionally scarred white man from South Carolina, is on the run after abandoning his home. Bob is a talkative black man fleeing slavery on a Pensacola sugar plantation, Istillicha, edged out of his Creek town’s leadership, is bound by honor to seek retribution. In the few days they spend together, the makeshift trio commits a shocking murder that soon has the forces of the law bearing down upon them. Sent to pick up their trail, a probing French tracker named Le Clerc must decide which has a greater claim: swift justice, or his own curiosity about how three such disparate, desperate men could act in unison. Katy Simpson Smith skillfully brings into focus men whose lives are both catastrophic and full of hope—and illuminates the lives of the women they left behind. Far from being anomalies, Cat, Bob, and Istillicha are the beating heart of the new America that Le Clerc struggles to comprehend. In these territories caught between European, American, and Native nations, a wilderness exists where four men grapple with the importance of family, the stain of guilt, and the competing forces of power, love, race, and freedom—questions that continue to haunt us today.

Examines the Impact of the Idealism of the Personal Liberty Laws of Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin The Personal Liberty Laws reflected the social ethical commitment to freedom from slavery and as such were among the bricks that laid the foundation for the Fourteenth Amendment. Morris examines those statutes as enacted in the five representative states Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin, and argues that these laws were an alternative to the violence allowed by the southern slave codes and the extreme abolitionist viewpoints of the north. Thomas D. Morris [1938-] taught in the Department of History, Portland State University and is the author of Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860. CONTENTS I. Slavery and Emancipation: the Rise of Conflicting Legal Systems II. Kidnapping and Fugitives: Early State and Federal Responses III. State "Interposition" 1820-1830: Pennsylvania and New York IV. Assaults Upon the Personal Liberty Laws V. The Antislavery Counterattack VI. The Personal Liberty Laws in the Supreme Court: Prigg v. Pennsylvania VII. The Pursuit of a Containment Policy, 1842-1850 VII. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 IX. Positive Law, Higher Law, and the Via Media X. Interposition, 1854-1858 XI. Habeas Corpus and Total Repudiation 1859-1860 XII. Denouement Appendix Bibliography Index

Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought. A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny. In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks. Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.

This book combines a sweeping narrative of the Civil War with a bold new look at the war’s significance for American society. Professor Hummel sees the Civil War as America’s turning point: simultaneously the culmination and repudiation of the American revolution. While the chapters tell the story of the Civil War and discuss the issues raised in readable prose, each chapter is followed by a detailed bibliographical essay, looking at all the different major works on the subject, with their varying ideological viewpoints and conclusions. In his economic analysis of slavery, Professor Hummel takes a different view than the two major poles which have determined past discussions of the topic. While some writers claim that slavery was unprofitable and harmful to the Southern economy, and others maintain it was profitable and efficient for the South, Hummel uses the economic concept of Deadweight Loss to show that slavery was both highly profitable for slave owners and harmful to Southern economic development. While highly critical of Confederate policy, Hummel argues that the war was fought to prevent secession, not to end slavery, and that preservation of the Union was not necessary to end slavery: the North could have let the South secede peacefully, and slavery would still have been quickly terminated. Part of Hummel’s argument is that the South crucially relied on the Northern states to return runaway slaves to their owners. This new edition has a substantial new introduction by the author, correcting and supplementing the account given in the first edition (the major revision is an increase in the estimate of total casualties) and a foreword by John Majewski, a rising star of Civil War studies.

This 1967 book elucidates the positive content of the phrase 'Christian Principles', as opposed to its use as a weapon of propaganda. Thus, it reviews critical problems: the contrast between liberal and totalitarian states; religious persecution, and the problem of freedom in relation to Christianity and to modern political theory and practice.

A fascinating guide to the international bestselling Discworld series and the award-winning The Wee Free Men—soon to be a major motion picture Before J. K. Rowling became the best-selling author in Britain, Terry Pratchett wore that hat. With over 45 million books sold, Pratchett is an international phenomenon. His brainchild is the Discworld series—novels he began as parodies of other works like Macbeth, Faust, and The Arabian Nights. The Wee Free Men, one of Pratchett's most popular novels, will be made into a movie by Spider-Man director Sam Raimi. It's the story of 9-year-old wannabe witch Tiffany Aching, who unites with the Nac Mac Feegle (6-inch-tall blue men who like to fight and love to drink) to free her brother from an evil fairy queen. A fun, interactive guide that will explore the land of Discword, Secrets of The Wee Free Men and Discworld is filled with sidebars, mythology trivia, and includes a bio of the fascinating author Terry Pratchett, and an in-depth analysis of his work. This unofficial guide is a great resource for readers of The Wee Free Men and the other books of the Discworld series.