The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

by Andrew Delbanco,
The Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 7, 2018

Writing in his journal after the Civil War, Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, declared that Southern states seceded, to no small extent, because Northern states had betrayed their “Constitutional obligations as to rendition of fugitives from service.”