Recent scholarship on slavery and politics between 1776 and 1840 has wholly
revised historians' understanding of the problem of slavery in American politics.
Contesting Slavery builds on the best of that literature to reexamine the
politics of slavery in revolutionary America and the early republic.The original
essays collected here analyze the Revolutionary era and the early republic on their own terms to
produce fresh insights into the politics of slavery before 1840. The collection forces historians to
rethink the multiple meanings of slavery and antislavery to a broad array of Americans, from free
and enslaved African Americans to proslavery ideologues, from northern farmers to northern female
reformers, from minor party functionaries to political luminaries such as Henry
Clay.The essays also delineate the multiple ways slavery sustained conflict and
consensus in local, regional, and national politics. In the end, Contesting
Slavery both establishes the abiding presence of slavery and sectionalism in American
political life and challenges historians' long-standing assumptions about the place,
meaning, and significance of slavery in American politics between the Revolutionary and antebellum
eras. Contributors: Rachel Hope Cleves, University of Victoria
* David F. Ericson, George Mason University * John Craig Hammond, Penn State University, New
Kensington * Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University * Richard Newman, Rochester Institute
of Technology * James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center * Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
* Robert G. Parkinson, Shepherd University * Donald J. Ratcliffe, University of Oxford *
Padraig Riley, Dalhousie University * Edward B. Rugemer, Yale University * Brian Schoen,
Ohio University * Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University, Camden * George William Van Cleve,
University of Virginia * Eva Sheppard Wolf, San Francisco State University