"In this book, David Brion Davis offers a perspective on American slavery. Across temporal and spatial boundaries, he traces slavery from the ancient world to the era of exploration - with its expanding markets in such products as sugar, tobacco, spices, and chocolate - to the conditions of New World settlement that led to dependence on African slave labor. In the American Revolution, the issue of slavery crossed a kind of psychological boundary that placed black slaves outside the dream of liberty and equality and turned them into the Great American Problem."

"Davis then delves into a single year, 1819, to explain how an explosive conflict over the expansion and legitimacy of slavery, together with reinterpretations of the Bible and the Constitution, pointed toward revolutionary changes in American culture. Finally, he examines the movement to colonize blacks outside the United States, the African-American impact on abolitionism, and the South's response to slave emancipation in the Caribbean, which led to attempts to morally vindicate slavery and export it into future American states. Challenging these boundaries of slavery ultimately brought on the Civil War, which effected emancipation long before it could have been achieved in any other way."

"This book views slavery in a new light and underscores the human tragedy at the heart of the American story."--Jacket.