![]() ![]() We’ve had two full generations of emphasis on the fundamentally racist character of American life – North, South, even abolitionist – stretching back to Eric Foner’s classic Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970). ![]() But Goodheart’s work is part of somewhat different, and quickening, historiographic current. The role of what was called “The Slave Power” has been a subject of some probing analysis in recent years on the part of fine historians like William Gienapp and Stephanie McCurry. society from the most insistent form of this tyranny (which of course would persist in different form long after). In 1861, Adam Goodheart captures the moment – a three-month period spanning from April to July of that pivotal year – when resistance to minority blackmail crystallized into a movement which, notwithstanding multiple setbacks, finally liberated U.S. This aggressive gamesmanship finally came to a head in 1861 when a non-slaveholding majority finally said: enough. These individuals demanded, and got, special privileges, often by threatening to withdraw from national life if their demands were not met. But for hundreds of years of North American life, the term “minority rights” referred to a uniquely powerful set of people: slaveholders. The most common pairing for the word is “racial” we sometimes think of women (inaccurately) in this sense as well. In our lifetimes, the political connotation of the word “minority” typically refers to people we think of as underrepresented, even vulnerable. ![]()
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