Join us in the Book Talk with featured author Nancy Bradeen Spannaus. This event will be sponsored by the LDAA and the Carver Alumni Association on July 27, 2024 from 12 – 2 pm Saturday. Light refreshments will be served.
What Would It Have Taken to Defeat Slavery without a Civil War?
Did you know that the revolutionary British American colonies and the young United States were the centers of the most vigorous anti-slavery activity in the world? If that’s true, why didn’t it succeed? Could slavery have been shut down without a Civil War?
In her 2023 book, Defeating Slavery: Hamilton’s American System Showed the Way, public historian Nancy Spannaus argues that the crucial factor was the abandonment of the economic principles of Alexander Hamilton. A shift away from the slave economy was essential to fulfilling the ideals of the anti-slavery movement. Hamilton’s industrialization program presented the alternative, but was squelched for decades by opposition from a faction of Northern merchants, the Southern slavocracy, and Great Britain herself.
A moral society of free people demands a moral political economy.
Defeating Slavery details the history of the early anti-slavery movement, and recounts the fight up to 1833, the crucial turning point toward the War. An understanding of this history couldn’t be more relevant to the United States’ political turmoil today.
An appendix of 12 anti-slavery documents (many excerpted) from 1767 to 1831 is included.
Nancy Bradeen Spannaus, a resident of Lovettsville, is a public historian who has been studying American history, with an emphasis on its economic development in general, and Alexander Hamilton in particular, since the 1970s. In 1977 she co-authored a book of writings on the Political Economy of the American Revolution. After a career in journalism, in 2019 she self-published the book Hamilton Versus Wall Street: The Core Principles of the American System of Economics. In 2023 she self-published Defeating Slavery: Hamilton’s American System Showed the Way.
She runs the blog https://americansystemnow.com, which contains more than 600 articles on the history and principles of the American System of Economics, and teaches a number of classes at Lifetime Learning Institutes.