Eighty-eight years: the long death of slavery in the United States, 1777-1865

The American Civil War led directly to the passage of the 13th Amendment and the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. How that happened and why it took so long has been a matter of dispute ever since. In the 1990s, historians of the United States generally agreed that abolition in the United States was indigenous to the United States (except for a few brief references to Haiti, there were no connections to the broader Atlantic world), and that it took place in two distinct, largely unconnected phases. Northern abolition proceeded from the Revolution and was largely complete by 1804. The long road to Southern abolition began with the emergence of the Abolitionists and southern radicalism in the early 1830s, which ever so slowly gave rise to a sectional crisis that culminated in the election of 1860. When I began graduate school in the late 1990s, tight chronological divisions divided American history into a series of narrow periods. Social, political, cultural, and intellectual history occupied a series of separate spheres that rarely overlapped, while studies of slavery and abolition were specialist-driven subfields. In the 1990s, scholarship on the politics of slavery and abolition in the United States clung tightly to these narratives, and the literature had become ingrown, formulaic, and marked by tight chronological and topical divisions