Books in the Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures Series series

While recent historical scholarship about the relation of capitalism to slavery explores the depths at which US ascension was indebted to global plantation slave economies, John Matthews probes how exemplary works of literature represented the determination to deny the open secret of a national atrocity.

With a fresh interpretation of African American resistance to kidnapping and pre-Civil War political culture, Blind No More sheds new light on the coming of the Civil War by focusing on a neglected truism: the antebellum free states experienced a dramatic ideological shift that questioned the value of the Union.