The latest in Robert Riggs's Profiles in Terrorism series, this history presents a new interpretation of terrorism in the context of the institution of American slavery. It chronicles how terrorism emerged spontaneously in a political culture that had few such antecedents and played a very important part in the American Civil War. It is personality-focused and includes significant new profiles not only of American terrorists such as Nat Turner, John Brown and John Wilkes Booth but also of Americans such as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln, who were equally or more passionate and active around the slavery issue but who were opposed to terrorist methods.