Freedom's delay: America's struggle for emancipation, 1776-1865

Slavery and revolution: truths not so self-evident

Slavery and the Constitution: freedom compromised

Stumbling forward: emancipation proceeds in New England and Pennsylvania

Forward to the past: the South's "Cavalier Kingdom"

The arithmetic of emancipation: from the purchase of Louisiana to the compromise over Missouri

The sunset of Northern slavery: freedom without equality

The wolf by the ear: slave resistance, White reaction, and the growing abolitionist movement

Freedom's faith: slavery sectionalizes the sacred

Slavery and manifest division: the Mexican cession, Free Soilers, and the Compromise of 1850

Rushing toward disunion: slavery and the factious 1850s

Presidential politics and the war for slavery: the Southern decision to secede

Thenceforward, and forever free: Abraham Lincoln's journey to emancipation

Slavery's death throes: emancipation during the Civil War

Union victory and the Thirteenth Amendment: free at last?