I read this article by @karpmj in draft a few months ago. It's fantastic: "The largest and strongest slave society in the modern world history also produced the largest and strongest antislavery political movement in modern world history." catalyst-journal.com/vol3/no2/the-m…
@karpmj "Almost alone among its contemporaries, the United States ended chattel slavery not through royal decree, judicial verdict, or armed insurrection, but through mass democratic struggle. To be sure, electoral victories alone were not sufficient to destroy human bondage:...
@karpmj "that required the hard and bloody work of the American Civil War. But the legal emancipations of that war were all threatened, announced, executed, and sustained democratically, by an antislavery political party that won office through national elections....
@karpmj It was “votes,” as Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, that “made war and emancipated millions.”
