Beyond Slavery: The Northern Romantic Nationalist Origins of America's Civil War

In this work, Professor Wood has taken on an important and often distorted question—the role of slavery in bringing on the great bloodletting of 1861—1865. The old propaganda charge that the war was “caused by” slavery now dominates “expert” opinion with almost totalitarian rigour. But in his exhaustive research into …

In this work, Professor Wood has taken on an important and often distorted question—the role of slavery in bringing on the great bloodletting of 1861—1865. The old propaganda charge that the war was “caused by” slavery now dominates “expert” opinion with almost totalitarian rigour. But in his exhaustive research into this question—to be published as a three-volume BEYOND SLAVERY—Dr. Wood will make a courageous refutation of that interpretation. He will show how the war became inevitable only because Northern society was infected by the revolutionary romantic nationalism that rocked Europe in the mid- 19th century. The South remained loyal to the old American dispensation of classical republicanism, and thus had to be eliminated. It was not the South’s defense of slavery but the dominant North’s determination to redefine America that made conflict “irrepressible.”Wood reveals to us, chapter and verse, the real Founding Fathers and how they were distorted and falsified in the 19th century.