BOOK REPORT

Book Report

Book Report

Gary B. Nash

Gary B. Nash is a renowned historian who is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California Los Angeles and Director of the National Center for History in the Schools. He has published numerous books, articles, and essays focusing on race, class, and power dynamics in American history and is considered to be one of the most eminent social historians in the United States. Many of his texts are used in colleges and universities around the country.

Race and Revolution

The most profound crisis of conscience for white Americans at the end of the eighteenth century became their most tragic failure. Race and Revolution is a trenchant study of the revolutionary generation's early efforts to right the apparent contradiction of slavery and of their ultimate compromises that not only left the institution intact but also provided it with the protection of a vastly strengthened government after 1788.

Reversing the conventional view that blames slavery on the South's social and economic structures, Nash stresses the role of the northern states in the failure to abolish slavery. It was northern racism and hypocrisy as much as southern intransigence that buttressed "the peculiar institution." Nash also shows how economic and cultural factors intertwined to result not in an apparently judicious decision of the new American nation but rather its most significant lost opportunity.

Race and Revolution 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 background for “Race and Revolution”

This volume, based on the inaugural series of the Merrill Jensen Lectures in Constitutional Studies in i988, is a provocative exploration of the Revolution's "multiple agendas" (p. xi), including those developed by black and white participants who saw racial equality as a fundamental issue for the new America to resolve. The axis on which the three chapters turn is the Constitution: the implications of its provisions for the status of the African-American population, for the self-government principles expounded in the Declaration of Independence and by most leaders of the Revolutionary generation, and for the interaction of blacks and whites in a white-dominated society. Only lately, Gary B. Nash stresses at the outset, have historians rediscovered the broad extent of antislavery views during the late eighteenth century; until recently this outlook was minimized and virtually ignored by the profession.

Summary of the contents

Drawing evidence from every region of the new country, from political leaders both liberal and conservative, and from religious spokesmen of many persuasions, Nash also cites the thousands of voluntary manumissions that contributed to the increased number of free blacks in the Upper South. He accuses earlier historians of the Revolution of "saying so little about the revolutionary generation's struggle over the issue of slavery as almost to excuse the institution" (p. 4). Even well into the twentieth century, historians ignored "the revolutionary crisis of conscience over slavery" or disguised it as the ...