Zietlow uses the life of James Mitchell Ashley as a unique lens through which to explore the ideological origins of Reconstruction, the political antislavery movement, and the constitutional changes wrought in this era. For scholars of nineteenth-century history, as well as the history of American slavery, abolition, and emancipation.

Rebecca E. Zietlow is Charles W. Fornoff Professor of Law and Values at the University of Toledo, College of Law. She is a recipient of the University of Toledo Outstanding Faculty Research award and a leader of the Thirteenth Amendment Project. She is the author of Enforcing Equality: Congress, the Constitution and the Protection of Individual Rights (2006), and her work has been published in the Columbia Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Florida Law Review, and the Wake Forest Law Journal.

Prologue; 1. James Ashley, the forgotten emancipator; 2. Antislavery constitutionalism and the meaning of freedom; 3. Free labor and wage slavery - the labor and antislavery movements; 4. Ashley's egalitarian free labor vision; 5. Ashley in Congress, 1859-63; 6. The thirteenth amendment and a new republic; 7. Enforcing the thirteenth amendment: reconstruction and a positive right to free labor; 8. After Congress: the 'Old Antislavery Guard' and the northern worker; Epilogue.