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The essay reconstructs the conflict over emancipation that unfolded in the United States in the decades before the Civil War, focusing on the discourse of Northern political economy and particularly on the writings of Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879). The essay’s goal is to show that, between the 1830s and the 1850s, Northern economists, against radical abolitionism, elaborated a gradual and limited vision of emancipation, in the attempt to guarantee, even after the end of slavery, the command over black labor in the South and the persistence of American capitalism’s racial and class hierarchies. Moreover, the essay highlights how this vision of emancipation, despite being influential on the Republican Party and the Lincoln administration, was defeated by the slaves’ «general strike» during the Civil War.