Coming for to Carry Me Home Race in America from Abolitionism to Jim Crow

Coming for to Carry Me Home examines the history of the politics surrounding U.S. race relations during the half century between the rise of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s and the dawn of the Jim Crow era in the 1880s. J. Michael Martinez argues that Lincoln and the Radical Republicans were the pivotal actors, albeit not the architects, that influenced this evolution, a kind of fulcrum between what came before and what came after. To understand how Lincoln and his contemporaries viewed race, Martinez first explains the origins of abolitionism and the tumultuous decade of the 1830s, when that generation of political leaders came of age.  He then follows the meandering trail through Reconstruction, Redemption, and the beginnings of legal segregation in the 1880s. The book addresses the central question of how and why the concept of race changed during this period.