Nicholas Guyatt teaches history at Cambridge. Bind Us Apart: A Prehistory of ‘Separate but Equal’ comes out later this year.
On the evening of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted. The president had...
In 1805 there was a slave rebellion aboard the Tryal, a Spanish ship sailing from Valparaíso to Lima. This wasn’t unusual: hundreds of similar revolts broke out across the shipping lanes of the Atlantic, and nearly all ended in failure. There were rare exceptions: the rebels who seized the Cuban schooner Amistad in 1839 had the good fortune to make landfall in Long Island...
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