Book excerpt: A major new account of the Northern movement to establish African Americans as full citizens before, during, and after the Civil War In More Than Freedom, award-winning historian Stephen Kantrowitz offers a bold rethinking of the Civil War era. Kantrowitz show how the fight to abolish slavery was always part of a much broader campaign by African Americans to claim full citizenship and to remake the white republic into a place where they could belong. More Than Freedom chronicles this epic struggle through the lives of black and white abolitionists in and around Boston, including Frederick Douglass, Senator Charles Sumner, and lesser known but equally important figures. Their bold actions helped bring about the Civil War, set the stage for Reconstruction, and left the nation forever altered.