JONATHAN DANIEL WELLS is a professor of history in the department of Afroamerican and African Studies and dean of the Residential College at the University of Michigan. He is the editor of The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America and the author of several books, including Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South and A House Divided: The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America.

Wells’s explanation of the growth of free-soil identity in the North and the centrality of fugitives in that process is accurate, important, and clearer than a number of recent attempts by other scholars. That is a praiseworthy accomplishment.

JONATHAN DANIEL WELLS is a professor of history in the department of Afroamerican and African Studies and dean of the Residential College at the University of Michigan. He is the editor of The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America and the author of several books, including Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South and A House Divided: The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America.

Wells’s explanation of the growth of free-soil identity in the North and the centrality of fugitives in that process is accurate, important, and clearer than a number of recent attempts by other scholars. That is a praiseworthy accomplishment.

JONATHAN DANIEL WELLS is a professor of history in the department of Afroamerican and African Studies and dean of the Residential College at the University of Michigan. He is the editor of The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America and the author of several books, including Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South and A House Divided: The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America.

Wells’s explanation of the growth of free-soil identity in the North and the centrality of fugitives in that process is accurate, important, and clearer than a number of recent attempts by other scholars. That is a praiseworthy accomplishment.