Andrew Delbanco Quote

As one southern-born antislavery activist later wrote, it was a sad satire to call [the] States ‘United,’ because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life while in the other it was fading or already gone. The founding fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold.

Andrew Delbanco

As one southern-born antislavery activist later wrote, it was a sad satire to call [the] States ‘United,’ because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life while in the other it was fading or already gone. The founding fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold.

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About Andrew Delbanco

Andrew H. Delbanco (born 1952) is an American writer and professor. He is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and the president of the Teagle Foundation.
He is the author of many books, including The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (2018), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for "books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity", and the Mark Lynton History Prize, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, for a work "of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression". Melville: His World and Work (2005) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. He has written numerous essays on American history and literature, a selection of which appeared in Required Reading: Why the American Classics Matter Now (1997), as well as on U.S. higher education, in journals of culture and opinion, especially The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and The Nation.