James Windell’s Reviews > The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War > Status Update

This is the fascinating history of how the fragile image of a more perfect union – the harmonious living together of several states – unraveled & came apart at the seams. Behind that image was a U.S. unable to reconcile the matter of slave-owning in southern states with the often-fervid abolitionism of the northern states.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was supposed to heal the U.S. It didn't!