American Radicals Hardcover

USD $28.00

A dynamic, timely history of nineteenth-century activists--socialists and free-lovers, abolitionists and vigilantes--and the social revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil War era.
On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the country's fiftieth birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on their deathbeds. They would leave behind a groundbreaking political system and a growing economy--as well as the glaring inequalities that had undermined the American experiment from its beginning. The young nation had outlived the men who made it, but could it survive intensifying divisions over the very meaning of the land of the free?
A new network of dissent, connecting firebrands and agitators on pastoral communes, in urban mobs, and genteel parlors across the nation, vowed to finish the revolution they claimed the Founding Fathers had only begun. They were men and women, black and white, fiercely devoted to causes that pitted them against mainstream America even while they fought to preserve the nation's radical ideals: the brilliant heiress Frances Wright, whose shocking critiques of religion and the institution of marriage led to calls for her arrest; the radical Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison, whose commitment to non-violence would be tested as the conflict over slavery pushed the nation to its breaking point; the Philadelphia businessman James Forten, who presided over the first mass political protest of free African Americans; Marx Lazarus, a vegan from Alabama whose calls for sexual liberation masked a dark secret; black nationalist Martin Delany, the would-be founding father of a West African colony who backed John Brown's treasonous raid on Harpers Ferry--only to ally himself with Southern Confederates after the Civil War.
Though largely forgotten today, these figures were enormously influential in the period flanking the war, their lives and work entwined with reformers like Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Henry David Thoreau as well as iconic leaders like Abraham Lincoln. American Radicals writes them back into the story of the nation's most formative and perilous era in all their heroism, outlandishness, and tragic shortcomings. The result is a surprising, panoramic work of narrative history, one that offers important lessons for today.