The centrality of slavery in the North and South, Black resistance, and the greatest shift in the domestic use and formation of federal force form the foundation of Chapter 7. Here, the likes of Robert Smalls, an enslaved boat pilot in South Carolina, the hundreds of thousands of Civil War slave fugitives, Union and Confederate military leaders, President Abraham Lincoln, President Jefferson Davis, and others address the consequences of one question: should the United States deploy its forces, its violence, in support of slaveholders or freed slaves?

Chapter 5 studies the “problem of evil.” Violence is a learned behavior; peaceful interventions and de-escalation disrupt the learning cycles of violence. By 1859, Black and White abolitionists had been attempting to bring about peaceful interventions to stop slavery since the nation’s founding. But southern slaveholders were not going to give up their slave property. In the Civil War enslavers refused President Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation (being paid market price per slave in exchange for setting slaves free) time and again. This is the problem of evil. How does one disrupt a violent institution when, in this case, slaveholders refused peaceful means of abolishing it? John Brown understood this dynamic and he challenged the greatest enabler of slavery in the United States, the federal government. This chapter explores understandings of Black violence and Black authority (threats to the hostile differences of liberal society), the legal mechanisms used to deploy troops against slave uprisings, and interprets Brown’s interracial Virginia attack as an attempt to fashion a government that backs the enslaved over the slaveholder.

This chapter provides an understanding of how an Anglo-Atlantic antislavery movement and the prospect of emancipation in the British West Indies unleashed a growing debate on its impact on the United States. This followed from a history of fears of foreign “moral contagion” on the issue of slavery, and similar domestic anxieties — including slave rebellion in Virginia and an emergent abolitionist movement. Highlighting anti-abolitionist riots in New York in 1833 and 1834, it situates these events within trepidations of national and racial boundary crossings that grew out of anxieties over British Emancipation in its Caribbean colonies and its influence on America.

The Battle of Stalingrad had far-reaching effects on political policing. A string of military disasters over 1943 raised the spectre of the stab-in-the-back. The Gestapo also feared that news of German defeats would embolden a slave revolt. The economy relied on forced labour by 1943 and disruptions could seriously threaten the war effort. Faced with criticism and revolt, the Gestapo focused on the greater of two evils. But the lessons of history dictated that morale could not be ignored. The Party stepped into the breach. Local political officials gained authority to investigate criticism and warn minor offenders. The Reich Security Main Office acknowledged this new division of labour by early 1944. Barriers between Marxists and organized opposition blurred under these conditions. Torture and surveillance were cleared against any organized group. Selective enforcement continued nonetheless. The Party singled out subversive Germans with “doubtful attitudes” and warned “grumblers.” The Gestapo were free to handle offences that filtered up with greater severity and focus on keeping foreign workers under control. Selective enforcement moved deeper into German society.

“The slaveholders,” Frederick Douglass said in 1849, “are sleeping on slumbering volcanoes.” American readers in the 1850s were captivated by such apocalyptic imagery. As the crisis over slavery developed—from the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) to the Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854) to the Dred Scott decision (1857)—many became increasingly convinced that their world would, like Pompeii in the first century, come to a fiery, apocalyptic end. But debates arose about how and why the United States might come to an end and whether this end could be prevented. While abolitionist writers often described slavery as a sin, others thought of slavery as a national pathology that might be cured or, at the very least, managed. This chapter explores the apocalyptic dimensions of the period that has long been called the American Renaissance.

Chapter 5 connects efforts to reinvent to French colonial empire between the Seven Years War and the French Revolution explored in the previous chapters to the development of a republican imperial agenda during the French Revolution. Showing how it was initially the French abolitionist society, the société des amis des noirs, who carried forward earlier arguments about the value of free labour over slave labour, colonial integration over exploitation, and arguments for the creation of new colonies in Africa, the chapter discloses that it was only after slave rebellions in the Caribbean, revolutionary warfare, and terror secured the decree to abolish slavery throughout the French colonial empire in 1794, that a genuine commitment to thoroughgoing imperial innovation materialised. With the Constitution of the Year III, the French Republic integrated the colonies into the metropole as overseas departments. Shortly after, the Directory embraced the proposal to create new colonies in Africa based on a mission to civilise. Despite Napoleon’s restoration of the plantation complex in the Îles du Vent, the chapter reveals that political economists and stakeholders of colonial empire continued to promote colonial integration and African expansion into the nineteenth century.