GLC@Lunch: Evan Turiano, “The Perpetual Crisis: Accused Freedom Seekers and the Coming of the Civil War”

This talk will examine the conflict surrounding the contested legal rights of people accused of being fugitive slaves and how their activism fueled the politics of abolition. African Americans accused of being fugitive slaves asserted access to a suite of legal rights, spurring political fights about African Americans’ citizenship rights in the federal system. Slaveholders, on the other hand, claimed that any recognition of Black legal rights in the United States threatened the comprehensive property right that formed the backbone of their economic domination. This talk will tell the story of how that conflict, over eight decades, paved the road to the Civil War and the destruction of United States slavery.