Professor Calvin Schermerhorn, from Arizona State University, offers a look at his new book, Money over Master, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South. Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this indistrializing process was slave labor. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block.