RACE AND REVOLUTION

An Analytical Evaluation of Gary Nash's “Race and Revolution”



An Analytical Evaluation of Gary Nash's “Race and Revolution”

Introduction

Gary Nash's provided three essays and supporting annotated documents related to the ignored subject of slavery during the Revolutionary era. They are combined in a book namely in his book “Race and Revolution”. In the 18th century, slavery was not a "southern" problem. The failure to rid the United States of an institution whose legacy continues to haunt the country even today lay at least as much with northerners as with southerners. This is the inescapable conclusion of Gary B. Nash's Race and Revolution. “Race and Revolution”, a book growing out of three lectures Nash presented in 1988 for the Merill Jensen Lectures in Constitutional Studies at the University of Wisconsin, describes the failure of the first abolitionist movement in the United States. This paper provides an analytical evaluation of gary nash's “Race and Revolution”.

Discussion

The first essay documents the effect of republican ideology on antislavery thought as leaders from the Chesapeake to New England searched for "painless" ways to abolish an institution that so obviously violated the precepts of freedom and equality upon which the new nation rested. The second essay focuses on the failure of abolitionism in the post-revolutionary era. It questions the conventional wisdom of historians concerning the practical necessity for compromise over slavery at the Constitutional Convention. As Nash sees it, the compromise was not necessary, for South Carolina and Georgia needed the protection of a national government more than the new nation needed the Deep South. While slavery was a "national problem" that "required a national solution," northerners were more than willing to accept the contradiction of slavery and republicanism in the North as well as in the South because they were not willing to pay the economic and social costs that a free society entailed. (Lawrence 2005)

They reluctantly freed their own slaves; they refused to consider plans for compensating slave owners; they willingly acquiesced in slavery in return for southern votes for more "important" issues: support for the Constitution, for instance, or for Alexander Hamilton's funding program. Most important, the collapse of abolitionist sentiment in the North resulted from the inability of its leaders "to envision a truly biracial republican society." As northerners' Enlightenment belief in environmentalism weakened and as they grew more hostile to free blacks in their own cities, they refused to consider southern plans for abolition, neglected to offer solutions of their own, and were in the vanguard of the movement to develop a racist rationale for the continuation of slavery. Thus, as Nash explains in his third essay, it was left to African-American leaders to fight for the freedom that white Americans denied them. Imbued with republican ideals, they turned the War for Independence into "the largest slave uprising in our history." (Nash 2006)

They petitioned for their freedom, joined the British forces, or simply ran away, taking advantage of the "cracks in the wall of slavery that had opened during the Revolution" as they ...