Revolutionary Voices from the American Presidents' Slave Houses

After securing independence, America's Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia's Independence Hall to draft a Constitution. Article II, Section I vested executive power in a president, an office to be filled by the will of "We the People." The judgment of each president would prove critical to the grand experiment of American democracy. Yet, from 1789 to 1865, every single president personally accepted or permitted the continuation of American slavery—a vile and brutal system that used generations of enslaved people as free labor to fuel the nation's economy, offering no reparations upon its violent end. Revolutionary Voices from the American Presidents' Slave Houses offers a critical analysis of each administration, exposing the stark contradiction between the nation's professed ideals of liberty and its presidential endorsement of slavery. The book centers the revolutionary voices of the enslaved and their descendants, who spoke truth to power through resistance and upheld a vision of a nation truly "indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."