Arguing about Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress Tapa blanda - 1998

Primera línea

ON DECEMBER 16, 1835, an otherwise undistinguished thirty-eight-year-old congressman named John Fairfield, from York County, Maine, rose upon his legs in the United States House of Representatives to present the first of session's petition for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.

Descripción de la solapa

In the 1830s slavery was so deeply entrenched that it could not even be discussed in Congress, which had enacted a "gag rule" to ensure that anti-slavery petitions would be summarily rejected. This stirring book chronicles the parliamentary battle to bring "the peculiar institution" into the national debate, a battle that some historians have called "the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy." The campaign to make slavery officially and respectably debatable was waged by John Quincy Adams who spent nine years defying gags, accusations of treason, and assassination threats. In the end he made his case through a combination of cunning and sheer endurance. Telling this story with a brilliant command of detail, Arguing About Slavery endows history with majestic sweep, heroism, and moral weight.

"Dramatic, immediate, intensely readable, fascinating and often moving."--New York Times Book Review