Modernizing "Difference": The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776-1840

As the decade of the 1830s opened, people living in the states "north of slavery" found themselves facing unprecedented dangers and opportunities that resulted from rapidly accumulating racial tensions. Stewart seeks to explain what deeper historical developments led the North to this sudden conjuncture in the late 1820s and early 1830s, what its specific dynamics were, and how its long-term influence reshaped and reinforced the power of "race" to define the modernizing political culture of the free states before the Civil War.