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Abolitionism and Racial Equality

The abolitionists active in the United States between the 1830s and the 1860s did not think of themselves as a left. Instead, like so many American activists and radicals, they mostly thought of themselves as evangelical Protestants, doing God’s work, although one of the leading figures, Ernestine Rose, was Jewish. Nonetheless, by any reasonable historical assessment the abolitionists, or at least their “immediatist” or Garrisonian wing, about whom I will mostly be writing, did constitute an American left. Not only that, they constituted the first American left.

Many of them free blacks, the abolitionists flourished amid an enormous wave of reform movements, Fourierist, Owenite and other utopian and socialist communities, and the huge explosion of democratic self-awareness that characterized Jacksonian America. I have chosen to focus on them, however, because as much as or more than any of their contemporaries they invented so much of the repertoire of the subsequent American left, including nonviolent resistance, democratic agitation, cultural and sexual experimentation, and unremitting attempts to shame the liberal, hypocritical majority. They were among the first to explore the power of a principled minority to upset carefully constructed coalitions, that is to disrupt the control mechanisms built into the new mass parties. Above all they – or at least the more radical currents among them – were focused on the goal of bringing the American people to accept blacks as their fellow countrymen. For them political equality was inseparable from racial equality, especially in immediate, one-to-one relations, such as the abolition of the “negro pew” in churches, the integration of the elementary schools, and the legitimation of mixed marriages. Once the principle of racial equality was accepted, they believed, the imperative of abolishing slavery would become immediately clear.

The abolitionist focus on equality as the basis of American nationhood may be contrasted to the thinking of the American revolutionaries. No doubt, this question is complex and many histories stress the importance to the American radical tradition of figures like Thomas Paine, the very idea of a right of revolution, and the struggle not just over home rule, but over who should rule at home. Nonetheless, at a basic level, the Revolution of 1776 had the aim of national independence; it was not a crisis in the sense that the Civil War was a crisis. Indeed, it is important to my argument that, while the American Revolution was taken as a model for many later national independence movements, it is regularly contrasted with the movements identified with the left. Thus, Edmund Burke praised the American Revolution because it was based on long established rights of Englishmen, just as he attacked the French Revolution because it was based on abstract principles of universal equality. Friedrich von Gentz, a polemicist of the eighteenth century, wrote: “The American revolution was from beginning to end, on the part of the Americans, a defensive revolution; the French was from beginning to end, in the highest sense of the word, an offensive revolution.” By this Gentz meant that the Americans were seeking to protect long-established rights, whereas the French were trying to create a new world. So compelling was this contrast that John Adams, the second President of the United States, translated and published Gentz’s pamphlet with the aim of freeing the American Revolution from the “disgraceful imputation of having proceeded from the same principles as the French.”1 In 1955 Russell Kirk, a founder of contemporary neo-conservatism, republished Adams’s translation as a mass-market paperback.

On the crucial question of slavery, the American Revolution emancipated the slaves in most Northern states, excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory and set an end to the Atlantic slave trade. But otherwise the Constitution aimed to remove the slavery question from national politics, to leave its disposition to the masters, and to allow for racial discrimination in the nonslave states. By contrast, the abolitionists believed that it was impossible to imagine the American nation except on the basis of racial equality. In the service of that end, they were not afraid to offend American patriotism. After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire on August 1, 1833 they reversed the clichéd contrast between British despotism and American freedom by regularly celebrating August 1 as the Black Fourth of July.2 Neither simply “for” nor “against” their country, they refused to regard the United States as a completed entity. Treating the country instead as a project, they sought to revise America’s identity by insisting on the centrality of equality. This, too, set them apart from the revolutionaries of 1776. While independence is an objective fact to be celebrated and memorialized ever after, equality is a project, always in need of improvement and elaboration. In turning equality into the project that Richard Rorty called “achieving our country,” the abolitionists helped kick-start the American left.³

The story of the American left also begins with the abolitionists because as much as or more than their contemporaries, they invented a new and anomalous American type, the radical who was defined by his or her ideals. Combining “steadfastness of purpose with an almost reckless disregard of self-interest,” willing to court martyrdom rather than give in to the majority, the radical relied “on a direct appeal to the moral sense of other people.”⁴ What the immediatist abolitionists realized was that the American commitment to equality is often so shallow, so compromised, and so easily abandoned in the face of short-term opportunities and practical constraints, that America needs a permanent body of “extremists,” risk-takers and scolds. In Michael Walzer’s words, American politics needs Saints characterized by an “uncompromising and sustained commitment to a political ideal (which other men called hypocrisy), and by a pattern of rigorous and systematic labor in pursuit of that ideal (which other men called meddlesomeness).”⁵ Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting the United States thirty years before the Civil War, was “astonished by the equanimity, indifference, [and] moral carelessness with which Americans managed to live with slavery.” The abolitionists did not share that indifference and they made indifference impossible for others, creating the space within which mainstream figures like Lincoln operated.

We also begin with the abolitionists because the Civil War was the country’s first and greatest crisis and the left, as I have argued, has a special relationship to crisis. Behind the war lay intensely rapid economic development as well as the growth of nationalism since Independence. Beginning in the 1830s or so, one can observe two different social systems pitted against one another: the North and West were republican, democratic, middle class, and believed in a wide dispersal of property. The South, though diverse, was still dominated by slaveholders convinced that patriarchal, hierarchical dependence was the basis of freedom. A struggle over control of the increasingly important national government precipitated the war. The Union’s victory brought not only the end of slavery, but the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which created national citizenship and guaranteed equality before the law. This outcome, however, proved reconcilable with racial hierarchy, as demonstrated by such elements of America’s post– Civil War history as the Black Codes, the disfranchisement of most Southern blacks, the institution of Jim Crow, widespread toleration of lynching, segregation of the armed forces, redlining, employment discrimination, and an almost infinite variety of other discriminations.

Abolitionism left a different legacy. The abolitionists created the model for the subsequent American lefts by insisting on equality as the way to resolve a national crisis. The crisis at issue had two aspects. As a system crisis, the Civil War may be understood in terms of powerful global forces, such as the rise of nationalism, democracy and self-government, forces that were at war with older forms of hierarchy. But as an identity crisis, the war posed the question of what it means to be an American. The abolitionists – black and white – answered that question by inflecting the meaning of American identity with racial equality. In doing so they presumed that white Americans, in spite of their racial prejudices, which white abolitionists knew they shared, believed in equality and could learn to live as coequals with blacks. To be sure, this extreme and minority viewpoint entered the American mainstream only by overcoming intense and pervasive resistance. However, the message was transmuted through the development of a great new mass party, the Republicans, through the terrible ordeal of the war, and through the efforts of many great leaders, including the greatest, Abraham Lincoln.

This, at any rate, is the argument of this chapter, which unfolds in three steps. First, I will show how slavery in the form of “primitive accumulation” was at the center of the national (not just Southern) economy. As such it infected the ideal of political equality, which is central to the republican tradition. Two innovative democratic institutions aimed to keep slavery out of national politics: the new, mass parties, and the cult of the family and “true womanhood.” These, however, also became the flashpoints through which abolitionism spread. In the second part I will show how the abolitionists grappled not just with slavery but especially with racial prejudice, which they related to America’s foundational and enduring tendency toward violence, to Indian Removal and to what we call today sexism. Finally, I will describe the crisis and the war, emphasizing the relations of the nineteenth-century Republican Party and the abolitionists and indicating both the success and the weakness of the abolitionist attempt to refound America on the basis of racial equality.

Slavery was integral to all aristocratic, patriarchal and paternal societies until the rise of democracy. In Hannah Arendt’s words, “All rulership had its original and its most legitimate [sic] source in man’s wish to emancipate himself from life’s necessity, and men achieved such liberation, by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them.”6 Slavery was enshrined in such core Western documents as the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the texts of Plato and Aristotle, the preachments of the Catholic Church (which owned many slaves), the Koran (the Muslims spread slavery throughout West Africa and elsewhere), and the great philosophical writings of the seventeenth century, such as those of Thomas Hobbes, for whom the slave was a vanquished warrior who promised absolute obedience in return for his life. Reflecting his or her dependence, the precapitalist slave was typically a member of a patriarchal household or, in the Islamic world, of a waqf (religious endowment). So common was such dependence that slavery was sometimes not a distinct status but simply the most extreme form of unfree labor, a category that also included serfdom, servitude, and indenture.

The men and women of the democratic revolutions understood freedom as the opposite of slavery. Just as slavery was rooted in violence and war, so freedom was rooted in the social contract. Just as slavery was rooted in privation and decline, so freedom was linked to abundance, and to the possibility of avoiding decline. Just as slavery pervaded the inner life, which was marked by sin and dependence, so freedom implied a revolutionary shift toward independence and self-reliance in human psychology. For defenders of slavery, the master had to oversee, guide and educate the bondsman just as the soul had to govern the body; to free or enlightened eyes, however, the slave-owner had put himself in God’s place.

Although the American ideal of freedom was based on this contrast, freedom could not emancipate itself so easily from slavery. American slavery was not ancient, patriarchal or aristocratic slavery but the new commercial – even bourgeois – slavery that emerged with early modern capitalism. Sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao from the Caribbean, tobacco, rice and indigo from North America, and gold and silver from South America supplied the basis for the new modern commercial empires – English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. Although slavery prospered during the mercantilist era, the plantations were not built by the state but rather by the “new merchants” of seventeenth-century England and Holland, who traded in mass rather than luxury goods. Run out of banks, counting houses and law firms, based on an extensive system of credit and bills of exchange (indispensable for bulk growing of raw materials and long-term exchange), inseparable from shipbuilding, banking, textiles and other key industries, the slave plantations constituted the sinews of commercial capitalism.

As a result, the newly emerging market societies were thoroughly saturated with racial violence. Insofar as slaves had been members of patriarchal households or religious endowments, they had been protected from the most brutal forms of violence, at least in part. On the capitalist plantations, by contrast, they were treated as factors of production: commodities. As a result, their condition worsened dramatically. As David Brion Davis has noted, from the 1440s, when the Portuguese began transporting black slaves to Iberia, to the 1860s, when the illegal slave trade to Cuba came to an end, an estimated 11 million slaves entered the New World. By 1820, however, when 2 million European immigrants had become 12 million, the 11 million Africans had left only 6 million descendants.7 This almost incomprehensible destruction laid the basis for the first great crisis of American capitalism, a crisis that arose from the fact that the American republic as a whole was deeply entwined with racial slavery.

In theory, America was a “yeoman democracy,” resting on a wide distribution of land and property. The English encouraged large-scale emigration to North America, so freehold agriculture developed alongside the plantations. In England inequality based on unequal land tenure had been ingrained for centuries, but in the colonies indentured servants, criminals and propertyless immigrants could attain independence. The result was basic to American republicanism. As Charles Sellers explains:

Cheap land, virtually free at first, not only elevated the mass but imposed a limit on wealth by making labor expensive. With farm ownership readily attainable, Euro/Americans would not labor for others except briefly and at high wages. A few years of high wages financed enough cheap land to yield a comfort and independence inconceivable to poor Europeans. With wages too high for most farmers to pay, production was limited – no matter how much land they had – by the family labor available. While raising European immigrants to an exhilarating rural well-being, the person/land ratio inhibited further accumulation. The resulting society of roughly equal landowning families was the seedbed of American republicanism.8

In practice, though, republicanism coexisted with slavery. Not only did the plantations dominate the rural economy, but they served as forerunners for the factories of the industrial revolution.⁹ Paradoxically, the democratic revolutions, by releasing men of property from clerical and royal controls, had thereby freed them to develop a new level of intensive organization reflected in the gang system, “an incessant cycle of planting, weeding and harvesting, and night work in the mill, adding up to eighteen hour days.” Planters turned plantations into total environments, bent toward “diligent and systematic behavior aimed at profit maximization.” The larger plantations were subject to every advance in scientific management, including “simplification and repetition of tasks,” coordination of labor, “precise calibration of labor inputs and subordination to mechanical rhythms,” dietary experiments, and smallpox inoculation, even as plantations also relied on the natural economy, with slaves building their own huts and growing their own food.¹⁰

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made both slavery and industry profitable and linked them tightly together. Southern plantations, securing the markets that Santo Domingo (today’s Haiti) lost after abolishing slavery, became indispensable to the British textile industry. Begun with the resale of high value Indian manufactured goods, especially calico, the industry switched to importing cotton and manufacturing cloth at home. As a result, it relied on the superprofits of American slavery to provide the capital and on the slaves to provide the cotton. Slave-trade ports such as Bristol, Glasgow and Liverpool became centers of textile production. According to Eric Hobsbawm, “the cotton industry was thus launched, like a glider, by the pull of the colonial trade to which it was attached; a trade which promised not only great, but rapid and above all unpredictable expansion.”11 Fueled by the “insatiable and rocketing demands” of Britain’s “satanic” mills, cotton plantations spread into Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

The result was the American boom out of which mass democracy, the slavery crisis and the first American left would all emerge. Between 1815 and 1825 the amount of baled cotton produced in the South quadrupled. In addition, slavery itself became an industry. Slave values more than tripled between 1800 and 1860. A Texas planter advised his Alabama nephew: “Get as many young negro women as you can. Get as many cows as you can … It is the greatest country for increase that I have ever saw in my life.”¹² By the time of the Civil War, “a young ‘prime field hand’ in New Orleans would sell for the equivalent of an expensive car, say a Mercedes-Benz today. American slaves represented more capital than any other asset in the nation, with the exception of land,” about three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads nationwide. Slave-grown cotton was also the nation’s leading export, powering the textile-manufacturing revolution in New England, and paying for “American imports of everything from steel to capital.”¹³

The cotton explosion fueled the great Westward thrust of the country. As the United States turned toward its internal market, the government cut the minimum acreage of land it would sell from 640 acres to 420 acres, and also cut the price, fueling a huge frontier expansion. The Ohio, Wabash and Mississippi rivers served as “interstate highways.” The steamboat made it possible to go up the Mississippi while roads, bridges, steamboats, and canals tied the national market together. The land office became the most important government agency. Meanwhile, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced at least 100,000 Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek and Choctaws out of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, driving them to the Oklahoma territories, with enormous loss of life and spirit.

Like the plantations themselves, and like the discrimination against free blacks in the nonslave states, the slave-driven expansion into the frontier forced Americans to confront the issue of racial equality. Clarence King’s 1871 Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada describes the funeral of an Indian woman, Sally the Old. As King studied her husband, Buck, watching “with wet eyes that slow-consuming fire burn the ashes of his wife,” he knew he was seeing “not a stoical savage, but a despairing husband.” Leaving the scene, King’s friend asked, “Didn’t I tell you Injuns has feelings inside of ’em?” King answered that he was convinced, writing “long after, as I lay awake through many night-hours listening to that shrill death-wail, I felt as if any policy toward the Indians based upon the assumption of their being brutes or devils was nothing short of a blot on this Christian century.” But the next morning, when King learned that Buck was drunk, and that he had taken a new wife, he questioned his newfound enlightenment.

Slavery, then, and with slavery racial hierarchy, was embedded in the first stage of American capitalist development, commercial capitalism. The violent appropriation of wealth, slavery, along with Indian removal, was the precondition for economic development that Marx called “primitive accumulation.” The key word is violence: primitive accumulation precedes and underlies the super-ficial equality of contractual and market relations. As the country developed, moreover, its violent underpinnings came to the fore. The result was a twofold crisis: On the one hand, a structural crisis, precipitated by the development of a national market, the struggles over a national bank, the growth of railroads and canals, and the drive for a more coordinated foreign policy; on the other hand, an identity crisis centered on the issue of racial equality. The convergence of these two crises created the political terrain on which abolitionism arose.

The American political order at the time of the Revolution was based on classical republican principles. It was assumed that only men who owned landed property or other secure, customary forms of wealth, including slaves, had the independence and breeding that conduced to virtue. But rapid economic expansion soon produced a new political order, often termed liberal-republicanism, and eventually liberalism. Based on John Locke’s idea that “every Man has a Property in his own Person,” liberalism valorized work and property as the basis of independence. Tocqueville, visiting America in the l830s, noted that “not only work itself, but work specifically to gain money” was considered honorable. The aim of work was not wealth but social and economic independence. As one newspaper argued, “every man holds his fortune in his own right arm.” Later Abraham Lincoln explained: “it is not the fault of the system” if a man did not rise above the status of wage laborer, either through his own “dependent nature” or through “improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.”14

In contrast to classic republicanism, liberalism presupposed the limitation of governmental activity and the guarantee of an unimpeded private sphere. Yet liberalism was also grounded in the market. As a result it required a state, not just for defense, but also to allow for coordination between competing elites, to provide internal improvements such as roads and canals, and to guide finance, typically through a national bank. The growth of an increasingly strong and increasingly democratic government was reflected in the two great political innovations of the Jacksonian period (1828–36): the “second party system” and a new, woman-centered redefinition of the public/private divide.

The second party system is the term historians use for the mass parties (Whig and Democratic) that emerged amid the economic expansion and explosive liberalism of the Jacksonian years. Unlike the first party system, which comprised the elite factions of the 1790s, the Jacksonian parties were mass parties premised on “universal” male suffrage. Aiming to appear as representatives of the whole society, the new parties tended to eschew divisive ideological issues. From this, some have drawn the conclusion that the United States has had no significant left, since it is controversial ideas and values that define the left. But the truth is quite the opposite. The diffuse, nonideological predispositions of the American party system created a special role for small, ideologically driven groups that interrogated the country’s identity, rather than seeking to advance particular interests.

The second party system revolved around a strong, charismatic President. It was in relation to such a Presidency that the American left developed its characteristic small-group form. The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian “revolutions” had made the Presidency the center of democratic aspirations. The War of 1812 and the subsequent Indian wars produced “a powerful nationalism, a militant liberal egalitarianism and a charismatic national political figure,” namely Andrew Jackson.15 After the battle of New Orleans (1815), Jackson was portrayed as “the embodiment of transcendent forces – nature, agrarian virtue, the will of the people or God.”¹⁶ He portrayed “himself as the tribune of the people against selfish and entrenched leaders. He relied on personal leadership to overcome [obstacles]. He fought conspiratorial enemies who were seeking to overwhelm republican virtue.”¹⁷

After Jackson left the Presidency “the routinization of charisma” set in. There arose “a new breed of politicians, men of humble origin who challenged genteel officeholders by courting voters assiduously in the oral style of rural vernacular.”¹⁸ These politicians “substituted the ties of personal loyalty to a leader … for shared beliefs in policy objectives. They relied heavily on the sentimental bonds which develop among men who have worked as a team in victory and defeat, and on the pragmatic importance of winning.”¹⁹ The pragmatic sharing of spoils and other rewards moved to the center of the new liberal order. Although never President, Henry Clay, “the great compromiser” (and Lincoln’s personal hero), exemplified this. Clay’s “American System” linked protectionism with internal improvements, high tariffs to provide revenue for roads and canals, and transportation appropriations to sop up surplus revenues. The only danger to stability, explained Martin Van Buren, President from 1833 to 1837, was the “clamor” against Southern slavery, which he feared could lead to sectional conflict.²⁰

The party system was one of two key institutions that served to hold the country together by avoiding the disruptive issue of slavery. The second was the conception of the family as a “haven in a heartless world.” That conception arose as production left the household for the factory and the office. Left to specialize in “social reproduction,” the domestic sphere, along with the disestablished churches, acquired a new ethical significance. Beginning in the 1820s, a middle-class ideology of domesticity overflowed “into advice books, home medical manuals, sentimental novels, and [into] the tales, verses and engravings of women’s magazines and decorative gift books for the parlor.” Written mainly by clergymen and physicians, as well as by women, America’s first popular literature was profoundly steeped in gender imagery. Such literature “grounded human relationships in a conception of True Womanhood as weak, selfless, and pure.”21 For example, the educator Catherine Beecher argued that only women were sensitive enough to be teachers and fought to establish schools along with ministries at the country’s frontier borders.

The cult of true womanhood complemented the two-party system by bolstering the American sense of national superiority, and by encouraging a sense of the inevitable contamination of political life. In addition, the cult informed and helped shape the codes that have regulated American protest, codes that encouraged genteel leadership, avoidance of conflict, and “uplift” among the oppressed. Finally, the cult of true womanhood helped bind the North and South together, giving both sections of the country a common set of familial assumptions. Thus, Southern slaveholders and their supporters had a patriarchal, romantic and chivalric familial ideology, expressed in dueling and other expressions of male honor, and in the idea that the slaveholder was responsible for all those in “his” household. Northerners rejected dueling but their idea of true womanhood was equally rooted in romantic, chivalric or courtly ideals, and often in an idealized view of the South as well. While North and South might differ on slavery, they agreed on the cult of womanhood. How bad could a slaveholder be if he subscribed to that?

Nevertheless, the institutions created to keep divisive issues like slavery out of politics also made it possible for the abolitionists to function. The second party system reflected the mass explosion of Jacksonian democracy. Not just poorer white men but women and free blacks took to the public sphere as if they owned it. With the shift from classic republicanism to liberal-republicanism, rights – the core of the American liberal tradition, as we shall see – came into prominence. As many abolitionists argued, the antislavery movement was America’s greatest “school for rights.” The second party system allowed for petitions, lectures, conventions, and the mass production of pamphlets, newspapers and posters, made possible by the newly invented steam press. The number of newspapers in America grew fourfold from 1830 to 1850.

As to the cult of true womanhood, its emphasis on sensitivity, suffering and compassion infused abolitionism with emotional content.22 Earlier forms of elite abolitionism based on rational argumentation gave way to attempts to stir up mass emotions. To be sure, the cult encouraged women to participate in politics as a redemptive force, reinforcing a gender stereotype. But it encouraged women’s activism nevertheless, including the common activism of black and white women, and it also revolutionized the relations of men and women. At the very time that the two sexes were becoming physically separated through the rise of commerce and industry, and the consequent separation between work and the family, they were also becoming psychologically closer and more entangled. The market revolution thus set in motion that tension-ridden but profoundly creative interaction between men and women that has been central to the American left. So explosive were the possibilities opened up by the new mass democracy that within two generations the United States had abolished slavery in a war in which the slaves themselves fought, denied compensation for the slaveholders, and granted citizenship and voting rights to the ex-slaves.²³ This could not have been achieved, however, without the intervention of the abolitionists, operating as the first American left. Their key innovation was what became the characteristic organizational form of American radicalism, the intensely-cathected, ideologically-motivated, uncompromising small group.

The sources of the antislavery tradition are many and varied. They include Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau, Reformation precedents such as the Münster Anabaptists who “made the immediate surrender of personal property a test of faith,” Arminian reformers who rejected the doctrine of original sin, maroons, slave rebels, rioters, heretics, army agitators, independent women, urban mobs, strikers, “rural barbarians of the commons” (as Thomas Malthus called them), rural farmers, maritime laborers, peasant rebels, Cossacks, and free thinkers who made up the everyday ranks of the democratic revolutions.²⁴

Nevertheless, antislavery took a decisive turn when the French Revolution inspired the slave revolt in Santo Domingo, the “treasure house of eighteenth-century France.” The colony had half a million slaves plus thousands of mulattos and freed slaves. It produced half the coffee in the world and exported almost half as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined. As Santo Domingo was literally part of France, its free blacks and mulattos demanded citizenship in 1791, just as their white counterparts in France had the previous year.25 On April 4, 1792 the French legislative assembly decreed free and equal rights to all free blacks and mulattos in the French colonies, “one of the truly great achievements of the French Revolution,” according to David Brion Davis, precipitating the issuance of a general decree of emancipation by one of the black generals, Toussaint L’Ouverture.²⁶ In February 1794 the National Convention in Paris abolished slavery throughout the French colonies and granted rights of citizenship to all men regardless of color. Robespierre declared, “Let the colonies perish rather than a principle,” while the sans-culottes denounced the “aristocracy of the skin.”²⁷ Although in 1802 Napoleon, with British and US encouragement, sought to regain the island and reestablish slavery, and although L’Ouverture was captured and died in France, a slave army effectively ended Napoleon’s ambitions for a revived empire in the New World, directly precipitating the Louisiana Purchase.²⁸

In the decades following the Haitian Revolution, slavery was abolished everywhere in the world except Cuba, Brazil, and the United States. In 1819 hundreds of Haitian fighters, known as “los franceses,” sailed with Simon Bolivar in the invasion that precipitated Latin America’s independence from Spain. In return Bolivar promised to extinguish slavery in the lands he was to free.²⁹ After independence, all the Spanish American republics except Paraguay adopted “free womb” laws, meaning that the children of slaves were freed, and one by one the republics began to abolish slavery. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, leading many Texans to convert their slaves to indentured servants. After the slave uprising in Jamaica of 1831–2 slavery was abolished in the British Empire. Finally, US slavery was abolished with the Civil War (1861–5).

Eric Williams’s 1944 Capitalism and Slavery is often considered the first modern attempt to explain the abolition of slavery.³⁰ In Williams’s view, slavery conflicted with industrialization; thus self-interest explains emancipation. Further research demonstrated, however, that slavery was booming and seemed headed for a long life when it was abolished. Accepting the fact that slavery was profitable led to the second great explanation for abolition, that of Howard Drescher, according to which the massive “econocide” of abolition – the destruction of a hugely profitable industry – demonstrated the ability of humanitarian interests to triumph over economic ones. Many contemporary works also ascribe the end of slavery to the apparently inevitable rise of universal human rights. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, an alternative to both views developed in what might be termed the neo-Marxist work of David Brion Davis.

According to Davis, the rise of large-scale industrial capitalism required a moral justification. Antislavery, Davis held, supplied that justification. The abolition of slavery, he writes, “was a highly selective response to labor exploitation. It provided an outlet for demonstrating a Christian concern for human suffering and injustice, yet thereby gave a certain moral insulation to economic activities less visibly dependent on human suffering and injustice.”31 Antislavery thus served as a kind of “ideological supplement” to the emerging wage-labor system. In Davis’s summary:

There was a pressing need felt by both skilled workers and employers to dignify and even ennoble wage labor, which for ages had been regarded with contempt. And what could better dignify and ennoble free labor, and even provide a sense of equality between the man who pays wages and the man who receives them than a common crusade against chattel slavery?

Like any ideology, antislavery was two-sided in its implications. As Davis writes, the “sense of self-worth created by dutiful work” could be cynically manipulated “as a way of disguising exploitation” or it could lead to the recognition of “elements of equality in people of subordinate status.”³² Davis’s explanation sets the stage for understanding the “extra” contribution of the abolitionists. Embracing racial equality as the goal of their struggle, the abolitionist movement did not exhaust itself with the end of slavery and the triumph of liberal capitalism. Rather, it left a residue or supplement, by interpreting the abolition of slavery through the lens of equality. That supplement was the seed from which subsequent American lefts germinated.

The special role played by the abolitionists in the genesis of the American left can be better understood if we contrast American abolitionism to British. As in the United States, British antislavery leaders such as William Wilberforce drew on the new evangelical strains (in their case among Anglicans) to moralize reform. In contrast to the United States, however, British antislavery remained under the control of ruling elites, for whom it functioned as a symbol of Britain’s moral supremacy, idealism and willingness to forgo material advantage. Focused on the single goal of abolition, British abolitionists tried to build a parliamentary majority, moderating their views to attract votes. Urging that slaveholders be compensated, they cautioned, “though men may be generous with their own property, they should not be so with the property of others.”33 Even so, it took the slave uprising in Jamaica of 1831–2 to bring the matter to a head, exemplifying what Barrington Moore called the contribution of revolution to gradualism.³⁴ British antislavery signaled the triumph of idealism over materialism. In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, Britain insisted on an international treaty banning the slave trade, an act that signaled Britain’s moral leadership of the international coalition meant to check, if not reverse, the French Revolution.³⁵ The residue left by British antislavery was Britain’s hegemony over the global capitalist system.

David Brion Davis’s paradigm explains British antislavery well. Abolitionism served as an “ideological supplement” to the triumph of laissez-faire industrial capitalism. By supporting abolition, Britain’s dominant classes were able to identify themselves with what they portrayed as the ethical side of market forces.³⁶ At the very moment that industrial capitalism was taking root, antislavery seemed to demonstrate that moral values were more important than money. Slavery was abolished under the leadership of a liberal elite and through classic, liberal techniques: compromise, moderation, and deal-making among special interests, all of whom wound up benefiting. Abolition therefore served to demonstrate the essential benignity of capitalism, as well as the efficacy of gradualism in the service of reform.

The British abolition of slavery exemplifies liberalism (and republicanism) without a left. By contrast, the United States exemplifies liberalism with a left. Of course, slavery played a much more direct role in American society than it did in British; America was a slave society whereas British slavery was colonial. Nonetheless, there was a further difference: the “extremism” of American abolitionism. Through the abolitionists’ unrelenting pressure on American public opinion and on the ante-bellum Republican Party, the ideal of racial equality became core to the nation’s identity. Because the abolitionists deeply impressed the antislavery struggle with the issue of racial equality, the American Civil War should be considered a refounding of the American nation, not simply the preservation of the union.

By speaking of a “refounding” I mean to contrast two different conceptions of American history. One conception sees the nation as having been founded with the “blessings of liberty” already present, only needing to be extended to new groups such as blacks and women. The idea of refounding is an alternative to this view. It presumes not only that freedom and equality are long-term projects, rather than already present, but also that they entail internal conflict, struggle, and contradiction. The confrontation with slavery was the first moment at which a view of America as crisis-prone and riven by contradictory forces loomed into view. But it was not the last time, to be sure.

Abolitionist sentiment and abolitionist societies could be found in America in the revolutionary period and before. But American abolitionism was profoundly transformed around 1830, with the creation of what is variously called its “modern,” “immediatist,” or Garrisonian wings. The immediate impetus for the change came from Free Negroes’ resistance to the elite American Colonization Society, formed in 1816, which sought to return them to Africa. In his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, David Walker invoked the Declaration of Independence to denounce the fact that “for too long others have spoken for us.” Moreover, Free Negroes constituted the bulk of subscribers to such journals as William Garrison’s The Liberator (three-quarters of the subscribers during the first year of publication), as well as to African-American newspapers like Freedom’s Journal.37 Garrison, the most well known of the white abolitionists, converted from colonization to abolition as a result of his experience of the vibrant black communities of Baltimore and Boston.³⁸ Free Negro abolitionists brought African-American slave culture, including spirituals, into the abolitionist movement. There, views of the slaves as a chosen people became mingled with romanticism, transcendentalism, utopian socialism and evangelical reform: currents that had come to see the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century as spiritual events, revolutions in human consciousness, aimed at achieving what Alfred North Whitehead later called “the awakened solidarity of the human race.”

Together, Free Negroes and whites founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. At its peak in 1838, the Society had 300,000 members in 2,000 loosely affiliated local chapters. Extensive though it was, from the start abolitionism had the character of a sect, meaning that membership was based on conversion, not birth. One converted to abolitionism; one did not send in a check to an anonymous office. Afterward, one devoted one’s life to the cause. Abolitionists constituted a “blessed community”; frequently abolitionists married other abolitionists, and they referred to their fellow abolitionists as brothers and sisters, not fellow citizens. Particularly for whites, joining an abolitionist group meant standing aside from the dominant community. White abolitionism, writes Sean Wilentz, constituted “an act of defiance of widely and deeply held social conventions, [courting] disapproval, ostracism, and even physical attack.”39 Ostracism was welcomed as a sign of being on the right path, while ordinary self-interest was rejected. “None know,” wrote Wendell Phillips, “what it is to live, till they redeem life from its seeming monotony by laying it as a sacrifice on the altar of some great cause.”⁴⁰ Lydia Maria Child, an advocate of women’s rights and Indian rights, as well as an abolitionist, reminisced, “mortals were never more sublimely forgetful of self than were the abolitionists of those early days.”⁴¹ For Angelina Grimké, also a women’s rights advocate and abolitionist, “this is a cause worth dying for.”⁴²

The Calvinist idea of conversion was central to the abolitionist commitment: one dies and is reborn; one breaks with one’s place in both society and the family and creates a new identity.⁴³ A charismatic sect, abolitionism was part of the “benevolent empire” of evangelical reform, infused with millennial fantasy and a desire “to ‘come out’ of a secular world corrupted by market egoism” and to seek spiritual perfection by purging oneself “of egoistic possessiveness in relations of sex and property.”⁴⁴ Just as preachers like Jonathan Edwards had proclaimed the Great Awakening to be part of a global revival, so abolitionists saw themselves as part of a global wave of romantic sentiment, what T. E. Hulme called “spilt religion.”45 No less than the Great Awakening, abolitionism was a global event. But while these sentiments were widespread among the reformers and radicals of the age of Jackson, what distinguished the abolitionists was the relation of blacks and whites.

Free Negroes occupied leading roles in the Garrisonian branch of the abolitionists. White abolitionists cultivated black leadership, actively incorporating escaped slaves and ex-slaves into their organizations, and developing interracial friendships, sexual relations and marriages. Above all, whites were “radicalized by the novel white experience of listening to what blacks were saying.”⁴⁶ In 1846, for example, the black physician and abolitionist James McCune explained to his white abolitionist friend Gerrit Smith what must be done to convince Americans of “the eternal equality of the Human Race.” “Good Government,” he said, would help, particularly “Bible Politics.” But the “first principle,” he insisted, was racial equality. Government, McCune elaborated, was only the “outward sign” of an “inward and spirit-owned conviction.” Formal equality meant nothing without a shift in consciousness. “The hearts of the whites must be changed, thoroughly, entirely, permanently changed.” Whites had to learn what it was like to be black.⁴⁷

To be sure, the relations of Free Negroes and whites were fraught. Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave, wrote in 1860,

Consciously or unconsciously, almost every white man approaches a colored man with an air of superiority and condescension … Each prepares, when brought together, to soften the points of antagonism. The white man tries his hand at being negro, and the negro, to make himself agreeable, plays the white man. The end is, each knows the other only superficially.⁴⁸

William Whipper, a black abolitionist from Pennsylvania, concurred. When white and black abolitionists “meet each other,” he wrote, “it is for the most part under a mask, like courtiers, so that it is next to impossible, generally speaking, to divine their real meaning and intent.”⁴⁹

Nonetheless, whites sought to learn from blacks in one-to-one relationships. Angelina Grimké pleaded, “You [Free Negroes] must be willing to mingle with us whilst we have the prejudice because it is only by associating with you that we shall be able to overcome it. You must not avoid our society whilst we are in this transition state … We entreat your aid to help us overcome it.” Sarah, her sister, added that the inner barriers between white abolitionists and blacks could only be dissipated by “sitting with them in places of worship, by appearing with them in our streets, by giving them our countenance in steamboats and stages, by visiting them at their homes and encouraging them to visit us, receiving them as we do our white fellow citizens.”50 The abolitionists encouraged racially mixed marriage and early childhood coeducation. Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Child and Anna Dickinson all wrote short stories and novels defending intermarriage. In 1843 abolitionist pressure led Massachusetts to rescind its ban on black/ white marriage. A few years later abolitionists successfully integrated the state’s elementary schools.⁵¹ “While the word ‘white’ is on the statute-book of Massachusetts,” explained the abolitionist editor Edmund Quincy, “Massachusetts is a slave state.”⁵²

Breaking with the colonization schema for returning blacks to Africa meant accepting blacks as coequals in a political community. As Gerrit Smith explained,

Had I commenced with him [the Negro], instead of those who stood entirely aloof from him, I should not have been the victim of the colonization delusions for so long a time; for as soon as I came to commune with him … and, in a word, to make myself a colored man – I saw how crushing and murderous to all the hopes and happiness of our colored brother is the policy of expelling the colored race from this country.⁵³

Ever since the formation of the American republic, many Americans had been trying to get rid of slavery. As Lincoln explained, it dishonored their pride in being a republic; it weakened their self-confidence as a people. But as the example of the Colonization Society shows, getting rid of slavery could mean getting rid of the African-American race. By contrast, the primary goal of the Garrisonian abolitionists was not merely the abolition of slavery, but rather to transform the relations of black and white, both inward and external, and thereby to reestablish the United States on the basis of racial equality.

The Garrisonian group in Boston, which included black women abolitionist leaders such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, also pioneered in generalizing from the experience of racial inequality, that is in building what later lefts would call a theory. Thus, they understood nonviolence – central, as we shall see, to the second and third lefts as well – not simply as a tactic but as the ontological grounding of a just society. By the late 1830s, according to Lawrence Friedman,

a metaphorical view of slavery had … become basic to … [the Garrisonians’] general orientation. [Garrisonians] perceived black bondage as only the worst example of American reliance on force – of man oppressing his fellow man rather than partaking in mutual love. Oppression of man by man in all its forms, not simply Southern racial bondage, made up the American slave system.

The Boston group also regularly connected women’s inequality with racial inequality. As Garrison put it, “Our object is universal emancipation – to redeem women as well as man from a servile to an equal condition.”54

In stressing the role of violence in establishing the American compact, the abolitionists were grappling with America’s history of violent dispossession. Thus, they regularly connected slavery and Indian removal. Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker abolitionist, described the American people as “slave-holding, land-jobbing, and Indian-exterminating ‘republicans.’ ” James G. Birney, the Liberty Party’s Presidential candidate, complained that “not content with a war of destruction” against the Native Americans, Americans “traversed the seas, invaded another continent [i.e. Africa] … and enslaved their young men and maidens.” In 1836 John Quincy Adams opposed the proslavery Texas Rebellion by asking, why do you “an Anglo-Saxon, slaveholding exterminator of Indians … hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian, emancipator of slaves?” If the United States was dragged into a war, Adams insisted, it would wind up fighting its own internal “fifth column,” Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and slaves. The South, Adams rightly predicted, would inevitably become “the battle-field upon which the last great conflict must be fought between slavery and emancipation.”⁵⁵ Such formulations challenged Adamic views of the United States as a pristine Eden, instead bringing out the savagery and dark violence at the core of its history.

The abolitionists also extended their insights into America’s foundational violence to engage the theme of sexual equality. Thus, abolitionism provided the seedbed from which much of the American feminist movement sprang. Enlightenment works like Mary Astell’s 1700 “Some Reflections on Marriage,” and Montesquieu’s 1748 L’Esprit des lois, had made analogies between slavery and women’s condition, but in the evangelical, romantic context of the early nineteenth century abolitionists added the critical turn toward self-awareness. Abigail Kelley, a Quaker associate of Garrison, observed that in seeking “to strike his chains off we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves.”56

Abolitionism also provided the context in which white and black women forged bonds with one another. Thus, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, cofounded by whites and black in 1834, encouraged white women to seek out “our colored sisters.”⁵⁷

Just as the relations of black and white were fraught in the abolitionist movement, so were the relations of women and men. In 1837 abolitionists roundly condemned Angelina Grimké for insisting that women’s rights was a coequal cause with the abolition of slavery. Yet the consignment of women to the balcony at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London led directly to the first Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in June 1848. In 1860 Elizabeth Cady Stanton praised the radical wing of the American Anti-Slavery Society as “the only organization on God’s footstool where the humanity of women is recognized.” Nevertheless, she added, “many a man who advocated equality most eloquently for a Southern plantation could not tolerate it at his own fire-side.”

Abolitionists identified the traditional family and private property with the same “reliance on force” that underlay slavery. Stephen Foster, a radical Garrisonian, likened the family to “a little embryo plantation.” In several marriages, such as that of Foster and Abigail Kelley, the men cared for the children while the wife traveled and spoke.⁵⁸ So many women joined the abolitionist movement that Julie Roy Jeffrey referred to them as a great army. Harriet Taylor Mill called abolitionism “the first collective protest against the aristocracy of sex.”⁵⁹ Lydia Maria Child wrote that her husband “despised the idea of any distinction in the appropriate spheres of human beings.”⁶⁰ Like later radicals, too, the abolitionists encouraged lifelong same-sex partnerships, such as that between Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam. These partnerships are the forerunners of today’s gay marriages.

The most important contribution of the abolitionists to feminism lay in encouraging the entry of women into the public sphere, something previously restricted to women preachers. In this regard, as with nonviolence, the Quakers pioneered, as they had long welcomed women’s full participation in services. In 1833, at the founding meeting of the American Antislavery Association, Lucretia Mott rose to speak, but then hesitated as she realized she was not at a Quaker meeting. Beriah Green, chair of the convention, beckoned her: “Go on ma’am, go on; we shall be glad to hear you.”61 This incident attained iconic status. Later Angelina Grimké wrote to a friend, “it is wonderful to us how the way has been opened for us to address mixed audiences for most sects here are greatly opposed to public speaking for women … but curiosity for us in many & real interest in the [antislavery] cause in others induce the attendance of our meetings.”⁶² Speaking in public meant the empowerment of women. As Grimké later wrote, “My heart is pained, my womanhood is insulted, my moral being is outraged continually by men who fail to respect women.”

By speaking in public, abolitionist women challenged the public–private divide. In probing the meaning of being a free moral agent in the context of republican self-government, they were insisting that women could not be moral persons in the private – meaning domestic and religious – realm alone. When abolitionist leaders urged Angelina Grimké to explain that her interest in women’s rights arose from her Quaker beliefs, she rejected the idea. “We do not stand on Quaker ground, but on Bible ground & moral right,” she wrote. She explained the distinction in her 1837 “Human Rights Not Founded on Sex,” published in The Liberator. Woman, she wrote, “was never given to man. She was created, like him, in the image of God.” This was shown, she continued, by antislavery, “the high school of morals in our land.” Through antislavery:

We are led to examine why human beings have any rights. It is because they are moral beings … and as all men have this moral nature, so all men have essentially the same rights. These rights may be plundered from the slave, but they cannot be alienated … Now it naturally occurred to me, that if rights were founded in moral being, then the circumstances of sex could not give to man higher rights and responsibilities than to woman … My doctrine is that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do.63

In defining herself as a completely equal fellow citizen, Grimké was challenging the cult of true womanhood. She was insisting that her moral right as an individual had to be recognized in the political sphere, in the sphere – she does not yet use the word – of citizenship. Thus, it is not surprising that the famous 1881 History of Wom en Suffrage, written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others, credited “above all other causes of the ‘Woman Suffrage Movement,’ the Anti-Slavery struggle in this country.”

To conclude: Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argued that the cultural revolution that facilitated early capitalism had to pass through what Weber called the “deep spiritual isolation” of the individual. For this reason Weber singled out Calvinism from all the other reformation sects. Referring to predestination, he wrote: “In what was for the man of the age of the Reformation the most important thing in life, his eternal salvation, he was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity. No one could help him.” The abolitionist appeal was aimed at this deeply personal level. The fact that it was only a small group of black and white Americans who probed their relations to one another at this level of depth and self-consciousness does not mean that the episode was unimportant. On the contrary, it changed the meaning of abolition. One can speculate that slavery would have been abolished without the abolitionists, but without them the idea of racial equality would have been missing. We owe that idea, or at least its inception, to the abolitionists, hence to the American left.

A left can only flourish when it has a dynamic relationship to a mainstream progressive politics. This relationship, not the conflict between left and right, drives history forward during periods of crisis. The abolitionist contribution is unimaginable without the Republican Party, which emerged from a systemic crisis in the two-party system in 1854 and which gained the Presidency in 1860, precipitating secession.

The product of the market revolution, the Republicans were a coalition of Eastern businessmen, Western family farmers, railroad magnates, labor union leaders, German immigrants, and free blacks, united around such slogans as “free soil, free labor and free men.” Embracing social mobility and competitive individualism, rejecting “the permanent subordination of any ‘rank’ in society,” unburdened by a proslavery wing, the Republicans developed a coherent antislavery ideology which included positions on trade, immigration, schools, and land.64 Crucial to the party was its identification with the core – national, cosmopolitan – identity of the country more than with its local and peripheral identities. The only third party in American history that became one of the two dominant parties, the Republicans were the counterpart to British Radicals and Chartists who fought for the suffrage, to French Republicans, and to German and central European Liberals.

While the Republicans were a party, engaged with all the rituals, spectacles, and logrolling that characterizes the two-party system, the abolitionists were a single-issue movement. In examining the relations between the abolitionists and the Republicans, we can observe the template of “left/liberal” politics. These relations unfolded in three phases. In the first phase, 1830–48, the abolitionists agitated to bring the slavery issue forward and in this way helped prepare the way for the Republicans. In the second phase, 1848–58, the crisis that would lead to the refounding of the country on an antislavery basis emerged. Finally, between the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858 and Radical Reconstruction (1867), white Americans, especially in the North, accepted the fact that the freed slaves would become fellow citizens, and the ideal of racial equality, not simply the end of slavery, began to enter America’s consciousness.

In struggling with and against the Republicans, the abolitionists cultivated the most important political tool wielded by the left, namely agitation. Public speech or action that disrupts existing assumptions, agitation is the distinctive tactic of American radicalism. Although practiced earlier, as in the Boston Tea Party, agitation was transformed during the second party system into a permanent attribute of the new mass politics. The growth of agitation accompanied the expansion of citizenship, but the abolitionists added something unique. At a time when democratic participation was already exploding, they welcomed people of both sexes and races to their fairs, picnics, public meetings, and conventions. This practice, impertinent to some, was itself an example of agitation. As Wendell Phillips explained, “a democracy functions morally only if it has agitators who devote themselves to stirring public opinion … Only by being shocking, insistent, and intransigent can an agitator overcome public apathy and inertia, which always favor the status quo.”65

The aim of agitation was to win the public’s heart to one’s convictions, not to gain a particular reform. As Lydia Maria Child explained in 1842, “great political changes may be forced by the pressure of external circumstances, without a corresponding change in the moral sentiment of a nation; but in all such cases, the change is worse than useless; the evil reappears, and usually in a more exaggerated form.”⁶⁶ The insistence on agitation explains the abolitionist acceptance of the slogan “Moderation against sin is an absurdity,” discovered by Garrison in a Christian pamphlet in 1831. In the same year Garrison had published the first issue of The Liberator, with its famous editorial, “On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation … I am in earnest – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

In no area was the need to be “shocking, insistent, and intransigent” more important than in the abolitionist challenge to the patriotic ballyhoo of the Jacksonian era. Angelina Grimké described the United States as “rotten at its heart.” Frederick Douglass described the Revolution as a “shackles.” William Lloyd Garrison burnt the Constitution, calling it a “covenant with hell.” “I have no love for America, I have no patriotism. I have no country,” Douglass said, anticipating practically the same words spoken more than a century later by Malcolm X.⁶⁷ Not really anti-patriotic, these remarks were actually demands that the country reestablish itself on a new basis.

Along with agitation, the abolitionists elaborated the tactics of direct action and civil disobedience. Nonviolent direct action was a way of demonstrating the limits of liberalism when faced with a particularly divisive issue. Almost invariably, direct action led both the authorities and many private citizens to try to suppress free speech. The free speech issue, in turn, was the driving force in gaining support for the movement. For example, in the 1830s the number of antislavery petitions sent to Congress was so large that the House of Representatives voted to table them upon presentation. This notorious “gag rule” exposed the repression that underlay the second party system, ultimately protecting slavery.

Nonviolence was not a passive tactic but was rather aimed at bringing the society’s latent violence to the surface. “Antislavery lecturers were mobbed [by opponents] wherever they put in their appearance and were recognized,” according to Dwight Dumond.68 A turning point occurred in 1837 when Elijah Lovejoy, editor of an antislavery paper in Alton, Illinois, was killed defending his paper from a mob. “The most significant result of [such] repression was the growing willingness of many Northerners to identify abolitionism with the rights of freedom of speech and petition,” writes Aileen Kraditor.⁶⁹ As the abolitionists rightly insisted, it was the effort to keep the issue of slavery out of national politics that led to the repression of free speech.

Important as nonviolence was, not all abolitionists were committed to it; some sanctioned violence against slavery. The same year (1831) that Garrison began to publish The Liberator witnessed Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia, where fifty-five whites were slain. For Southerners, this was an unparalleled catastrophe, but Garrison defended the Rebellion. From that point on, the abolitionists appeared as fanatics to the vast majority of white Americans. For every convert to the cause, there were hundreds of Northerners who were repulsed by what the New Hampshire anti-abolitionist writer Thomas Russell Sullivan called the movement’s “false zeal and political aggression.”⁷⁰ Nonetheless, by mobilizing the potent image of the Slave Power, the abolitionists were insisting that racial slavery itself inevitably generated violence. “We commenced the present struggle to obtain the freedom of the slave,” wrote one, “we are compelled to continue it to preserve our own.”

Shunned by “respectable society” in the North, disowned by family members, subjected to mob violence, the abolitionists had a disproportionate influence. In the early nineteenth century, many Southerners had been critical of slavery. Abolitionism precipitated a monolithic proslavery Southern sentiment, as Southerners became convinced that their slaves only became resentful when incited by outsiders. As John C. Calhoun explained in 1837:

[Abolitionist] agitation has produced one happy effect at least; it has compelled us to the South to look into the nature and character of this great institution, and to correct many false impressions that even we had entertained in relation to it. Many in the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.71

Southerners saw abolitionism everywhere. It was Southerners’ extreme reaction to their own fear, evident in escalating demands to fully nationalize slavery, manifest in the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision, that led to the creation of the Republican Party and ultimately to the Civil War.

The second phase in the relations between the abolitionists and the liberal mainstream was marked by the birth of the Republican Party. The product of the disintegration of the second party system, the party’s founding reflected a conflict within America’s governing elites, betokening a genuine structural crisis. Under normal circumstances, elites mediate and compromise interests through the party system, the Congress and the courts. A crisis occurs when the elites cannot agree and the left becomes relevant. That is what happened in the decades leading up to the Civil War, as well as during the New Deal and again, especially during the war in Vietnam, in the 1960s.

During the Polk Presidency (1844–8) the country expanded by two-thirds through the annexation of Texas, the settlement of the Oregon boundary and the seizure of nearly half of Mexico. The discovery of gold in California, the Mormon settlement of Deseret (Utah) and the growth of the “Young America” element in the Democratic Party, which sought the annexation of Cuba, all intensified the expansionist drive. Expansion, James McPherson has explained, “had been the country’s lifeblood. So long as the slavery controversy focused on the morality of the institution where it already existed, the two-party system managed to contain the passions it aroused. But when in the 1840s the controversy began to focus on the expansion of slavery into new territories it became irrepressible.”⁷²

The first demonstration of the potentially explosive effects of expansion occurred during the Missouri controversy (1819–21), a result of the early expansion of slavery into the Southwest and the lower Midwest. John Quincy Adams detected the possibility of a new antislavery alliance, “terrible to the whole Union, but portentously terrible to the South.” The Democratic and Whig parties of the 1840s sought to avoid the slavery issue, through ending expansion (the Whigs) or allowing the people of each territory to decide the issue for themselves (the Democrats). In 1844, the two great architects of the two-party system, Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren, wrote letters opposing the immediate annexation of Texas because of the explosive possibilities inherent in the expansion of slavery. Nonetheless, after the introduction of the Wilmot Proviso in 1846, aimed at forbidding slavery in any of the territories conquered from Mexico, the room for compromise narrowed, leading to the formation of the Free Soil Party, forerunner of the Republicans. After 1854 the space for compromise collapsed, as territories in which slavery had formerly been banned were being opened to “popular sovereignty,” typically votes by the local territorial legislatures. Noting that collapse, Rufus Choate, a Northern Whig, lamented the passing of an era when “there were no Alleghenies nor Mississippi rivers in our politics.”73

The crisis provoked by expansion was deepened by the growth of factories, an urban proletariat, urban poverty, and immigration, especially on the part of Irish Catholics. Between 1850 and 1860 the percentage of foreign-born in the northeast United States grew from 15.5 percent to 22 percent. The workforce began to shift from independent “mechanics” to wage laborers, most of the latter foreign born. A new political party, the Know Nothings, erupted based on anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment. The seminal election of 1854, which gave birth to the Republicans, “seemed to indicate the possible triumph of Know-Nothingism rather than of antislavery. At that juncture there seemed to be a likelihood that the Catholic or immigrant question might replace the slavery question as the focal issue in American political life.”⁷⁴ Meanwhile, abolitionists tended to be anti-Catholic, partly in response to the papacy of Pius IX (1846–78), which had declared papal infallibility and condemned liberalism, socialism and public education. Like the expansion of slavery, the growth of immigration posed the question of national identity, a question to which the abolitionist insistence on racial equality was crucial.

The crisis provoked by expansion also had an international dimension. The defeat of the French and German revolutions of 1848 and the eruption of nationalist movements in Eastern Europe represented a new stage in the project of self-government, one in which nationalism and social justice vied for preeminence. The 1850s witnessed a global capitalist boom, sparked in part by the California gold rush. Charles A. Dana, a correspondent for the New York Tribune, wrote that while the 1789 revolution had destroyed feudalism, the purpose of the 1848 revolution in France was “to destroy the moneyed feudalism and lay the foundations of social liberty.”75 To some extent, abolitionists shared this sentiment, tying slavery to the world of monarchs, emperors and czars. Conservatives responded in kind, calling the abolitionists “atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red republicans, and Jacobins.”⁷⁶ The survival and meaning of self-government, then, joined with slave expansion and immigration to put the issue of the nation’s identity, and not simply the disposition of slavery, into question.

The Republicans were at the center of all three tendencies – territorial expansion, industrialization, and global democratization – that were bringing the North and West into conflict with the South. Appealing to farmers entering the market, to master mechanics becoming capitalist bosses, to manual workers seeking respectability, and to a new class of “white collar” clerks, salesmen, and bookkeepers, the Republicans represented the new idea of the American middle class.⁷⁷ As Lincoln later explained, they stood for economic opportunity, which was inseparable from social justice and equality. In his words, aimed at justifying the Civil War,

This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men – to lift artificial weights from all shoulders – to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all – to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.⁷⁸

This statement, which put the idea of equality at its core, made for common purpose with the abolitionists in the long run. The Republicans believed in expansion, but only tempered by middle-class leadership. In a New York Tribune editorial condemning the Mexican War, Horace Greeley explained, “Opposed to the instinct of boundless acquisition stands that of Internal Improvement. A nation cannot simultaneously devote its energies to the absorption of other’s territories and the improvement of its own. In a state of war, not law only is silent, but the pioneer’s axe, the canal digger’s mattock, and the house-builder’s trowel.”79

The first breach between the abolitionists and the Republicans came over the issue of free soil, meaning the forbidding of slavery in the new territories conquered from Mexico. The Garrisonians rejected the free-soil solution. Getting rid of slavery in one part of the country alone, they argued, would effectively serve to legitimize it elsewhere. When free-soil Congressmen were elected, and some sections of the public were willing to listen to them, the moderate wing of the abolitionist movement, along with many Republicans, felt the time had come to adapt the antislavery sentiment to the new situation. The radical wing, on the contrary, believed that agitational methods had awakened Americans to the danger that came from the aggressive slave power, but had not reformed white American’s attitudes toward the Negro. Northern whites were likely to support candidates who denounced slave power, especially after the Mexican War had extended slavery’s scope, but they were not willing to accept Negro children into their schools or abolish the “negro pew” in their churches. Republicans wanted to define slavery as a distinctly Southern phenomenon. For Frederick Douglass, however, “the whole system, the entire network of American society, is one great falsehood, from beginning to end.”⁸⁰

The second breach between the abolitionists and the Republicans came over “Immediatism.” Many Republicans, as well as many Democrats, had pointed to the difficulties in the way of emancipation, including difficulties for the ex-slaves. By contrast, the abolitionists demanded “immediate” abolition, meaning abolition immediately begun. As Garrison explained: “We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend.”⁸¹ To drop the demand for immediate emancipation because it is unrealizable, as Aileen Kraditor explained,

would have been to alter the nature of the change for which the abolitionists were agitating. That is, even those who would have gladly accepted gradual and conditional emancipation had to agitate for immediate and unconditional abolition … because that demand was required by their goal of demonstrating to white Americans that Negroes were their brothers.⁸²

Reverend Samuel May, a Unitarian abolitionist, explained: “We must hold fast to that adjective [i.e., immediate]. It expresses the only sound doctrine…. Nothing can be done for the improvement of the Slaves until their rights as men are recognized and secured – and when their rights as men are acknowledged, Slavery will be ipso facto abolished.”83 After emancipation, the practical issues of the transition to “freedom” could be dealt with, but to get drawn into discussions now of how emancipation would be handled would be to miss the point.

Abolitionism, by rejecting free-soil politics and insisting on immediate emancipation, became an inflammatory force that disrupted politics as usual, preventing cooperation and coalition-building. It also became an all-purpose symbol. A homestead law was labeled an “ally for Abolition.” When Southern Whigs blocked an antislavery candidate in 1852, they explained they did not want “to constitute a tail to the army of abolitionists.” Blocking the entry of Nebraska as a free state, Missouri complained it did not want to be surrounded by abolitionists.⁸⁴ The emergence of so powerfully negative a symbol had the paradoxical effect of tarring all Northerners by the same brush in the eyes of the South. Earlier, wealthy Northerners had been able to cluck over the evils of slavery while throwing up their hands in mock despair at their inability to do anything about it. But as the mill-owners reassured Southern planters that Garrison represented only a lunatic fringe, their own complicity with slaveholding was thrown into relief.

The influence an intransigent minority can exert on a relatively passive majority showed itself in 1858, during the Lincoln– Douglas debates. Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Senator from Illinois, defended the classical Democratic position of “popular sovereignty,” that is, holding elections in the new territories to decide whether or not to allow slavery. Lincoln described himself as caught between “the unreasoning populism of the Democrats, who believed that the majority was always right, and the equally unreasonable moral absolutism of … the abolitionists, who appealed to even a higher law than the Constitution.” Nevertheless, faced with this choice, Lincoln came down on the side of the latter.⁸⁵ While historians differ as to whether Lincoln’s focus on the moral character of the slavery issue was tactical or strategic, Lincoln and the abolitionists shared the perception that slavery was a moral issue that went to the heart of American identity.

The first issue in the debates was whether morality had any place at all in politics. For Douglas, the politician’s job was not to deal in moral issues. “He would not say that [slavery] was right or that it was wrong, and he professed not to care whether the people of a territory voted slavery up or down.” His proposed solution, “popular sovereignty,” was left deliberately vague and ambiguous as to its execution. Lincoln, by contrast, called Douglas’s popular sovereignty policy a “care not policy” that allowed the proponents of slavery to expand slavery without effective opposition. The only way to stop them was to elect Republicans “whose hearts are in the work – who do care for the result,” who “consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong.”86 “If you won’t say slavery is wrong,” Lincoln added, “you must think slavery is perfectly all right, since you cannot logically say that you ‘care not’ whether people vote in favor of something that is morally wrong.” Broadening the issue, he concluded, “I object to it because it assumes that there CAN be a MORAL RIGHT in the enslaving of one man by another … No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.” That, he added, is “the leading principle – the sheet anchor of American Republicanism.”⁸⁷

Implicit in Lincoln’s response was a second assumption, namely that “numbers should not be looked at as much as right.”⁸⁸ The “real issue” dividing him from Stephen Douglas, Lincoln elaborated, revolved around

the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

The only way to perpetuate slavery, Lincoln continued, was to “blow out the moral lights around us, and extinguish that greatest torch of all which America presents to a benighted world.”⁸⁹ In practice, popular sovereignty would mean that the issue would be decided on grounds of material interests. Thus Lincoln opposed it, writing in 1854 that popular sovereignty “is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature.” The opposite of a politics based on material self-interest he explained was “love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism.”90

The crucial point in Lincoln’s position, the point that protected the abolitionists even as he criticized them, was his conviction that the irrational, immoderate and implacable force in American life was not abolitionism, but Southern expansion. Beginning with the Fugitive Slave Act, and proceeding through “Bleeding Kansas,” the Dred Scott decision, and the provocations of 1859, the South had responded to the abolitionists by holding the country hostage.⁹¹ At Cooper Union in February 1860, Lincoln urged Republicans to make no provocative gestures toward the South. Republicans, he said, should swear to uphold the Constitution, enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and refrain from interfering with slavery in the states in which it already existed. “They could say all these things … and should. But it wouldn’t make any difference … Republicans could cede all the territories to slavery, and still, that would not be enough for the South. They could thwart all future slave rebellions and the South would still want more. What would satisfy them? Lincoln asked. What would convince them?” “This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”⁹² And that he could never do, so there was no room for compromise.

Where Lincoln differed from the abolitionists was over the issue of racial equality. Lincoln hated slavery in part because he regarded it as a form of theft. Thus he asserted, “if the Almighty had ever made a set of men that should do all the eating and none of the work, he would have made them with mouths only and no hands.” But Lincoln explicitly rejected racial equality. In his 1858 Senate campaign, he said,

I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races (applause) – I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.

Where then lay equality? “In the right to eat the bread, without leave of anyone else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. (Great applause.)”93 The continued relevance of the abolitionists, then, lay in their dissent from Lincoln’s views on the matter of racial equality.

The final contribution of the abolitionists came during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The beginning of the war saw the emergence of many positions among Republicans concerning slavery, including compensated emancipation and colonization. By contrast, the abolitionists and their allies among the Radical Republicans saw the war as an opportunity to refound American society along democratic and egalitarian lines.

The first consequence of the war was to heighten abolitionist influence. “It is hard to realize the wondrous change that has befallen us,” wrote Mary Grew to Garrison. Wendell Phillips, who could scarcely have entered Washington without drawing a hostile mob a year earlier, now lectured to packed, respectful audiences. Noting the change, the Tribune observed: “It is not often that history observes such violent contrasts in such rapid succession.” The New York Times, then as now the moderate “paper of record,” sent a reporter to cover the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society convention. “In years heretofore … much fun has been made of these gatherings,” conceded the Times. “The fact that black and white met socially here, and that with equal freedom men and women addressed the conglomerate audience, have furnished themes for humorous reporters and facetious editors.” This, however, was no longer the case. “Peculiar circumstances have given to [abolitionist meetings] an importance that has hitherto not been theirs.”⁹⁴

The reason for the change was that the Republicans had become convinced that “the fate of the nation could not be separated from the fate of slavery.” “When I say that this rebellion has its source and life in slavery,” declared Radical Republican George W. Julian, “I only repeat a simple truism.” “I am prepared for one to meet the broad issue of general emancipation,” wrote Senator John Sherman to his brother, the General. The issue, of course, was no longer abstract or hypothetical. The North was meeting the South on the field of battle. General McClellan, Commander in Chief of the Union army, warned Lincoln that the war should not be looking “to the subjugation of the [Southern] people.” Radical views on the slavery issue, he counseled, “will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.” But Lincoln had concluded that the war could no longer be fought “with rose water.” In July 1862 Lincoln replaced McClellan with Henry W. Halleck, who ordered his commanders to “seize enemy property for public use.” Lincoln then informed his cabinet of his intention to issue an emancipation proclamation in the areas occupied by the Union, although it took until January 1863 for him to carry this intention through.95

The suffering that Americans endured during the war led them to reconsider the abolitionist claim that slavery was not simply a Southern evil, but an American one. A growing sense of national responsibility and moral purpose lay behind Lincoln’s famous address at the memorial service for the Battle of Gettysburg, delivered ten months after the Emancipation Proclamation. Seven thousand corpses had lain scattered across the Pennsylvania countryside, along more than 3,000 dead horses and mules, “swollen and blackening in the July heat.” “Fathers and brothers wandered battlefields in search of missing relatives. So did wives and mothers dressed in black. Private agents promised to search for missing men in exchange for a percentage of their widows’ pensions. Spiritualists made a good living conveying vague but consoling messages from the Other Side.” “The war’s staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny,” writes Drew Faust, “one designed to ensure that lives had been sacrificed for appropriately lofty ends.”⁹⁶ Refounding the nation on the grounds of liberty and racial equality were just such ends.

To be sure, Lincoln tied the new post-slavery republic to its progenitor. The link was the Declaration of Independence. An obsessive student of the founding documents, Lincoln had come to believe that the Declaration of Independence was more important than the Constitution. The difference was the attitude toward slavery. Even though the Constitution sanctioned slavery where it already existed, he reasoned, the word does not appear in the Constitution. “The thing [slavery] is hid away, in the Constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.”97 The real purpose of the Constitution, Lincoln concluded, was to protect the Declaration of Independence. The founders “intended to include all men” in a compact of equality: not equal in “color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity,” but equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”⁹⁸

However, the Declaration of Independence had put forth an abstract, ahistorical conception of equality. It meant that no one held authority over others as a gift of God. Lincoln historicized the Declaration, turning its assertion of universal equality into an ongoing national project, a telos. At Springfield he elaborated, “the assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.” The Declaration’s signers “meant simply to declare the right, so that enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which would be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.” The War, then, with its terrible death and suffering, was necessary to answer the question of whether “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.”⁹⁹

By this point, Lincoln and other Republicans had transmuted the abolitionist message into a national language that transcended agitation and dissent. To be sure, the core problem of racial equality remained undecided. For every soldier who wrote home “I have no heart in this war if the slaves cannot be free,” there were others who wrote, “we must first conquer & then its time enough to talk about the dam’d niggers.”¹⁰⁰ Nonetheless, the use of the term “abolition war” to describe the Civil War, which at first had a negative connotation, began to take on a positive one.¹⁰¹ In 1876 when then ex-President Ulysses S. Grant visited Germany, Chancellor Bismarck remarked to him: “What always seemed so sad to me about your last great war was that you were fighting your own people,” adding “but it had to be done … you had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany.” “Not only save the Union, but destroy slavery,” responded Grant. “I suppose, however, the Union was the real sentiment, the dominant sentiment,” said the German Chancellor. “In the beginning, yes,” Grant responded, “but as soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.”

In 1865, when Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address, companies of black soldiers marched in the inaugural parade for the first time in American history. As many as half the audience who heard the address were black.102 If the number of white Americans who had begun to think in terms of racial equality was still not that large, at least Negroes were no longer a foreign, inassimilable element in American life, as they had been for the Colonization Society, and for many of the abolitionists of the revolutionary era. After the assassination of Lincoln, and the collapse of Andrew Johnson’s ultra-conciliationist Presidency, the Radical Republicans briefly controlled Reconstruction policy. Men and women, wrote journalist James Shepherd Pike, “may prattle as they wish about the end of slavery being the end of strife [but] the great difficulty will then but begin! The question is the profound and awful one of race.”¹⁰³ According to historian George Fredrickson, “The enfranchisement of southern Blacks by the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 inaugurated what may have been the most radical experiment in political democracy attempted anywhere in the nineteenth century.”¹⁰⁴ Southern Republicans, black and white, established a public school system, and built railroads and public works. Black political participation was not equaled again until the 1960s. Northern whites and blacks went south to start schools and businesses. The Freedmen’s Bureau supplied the template for the later American welfare state. The adoption of sharecropping as an alternative to reconstituted plantations reflected the freedmen’s access to the state. Nowhere else, writes Steven Hahn, “were so many servile laborers liberated in one stroke or soon after provided equivalent civil and political rights.”¹⁰⁵

The abolitionist insistence on a radical, egalitarian solution to the slavery crisis had global, as well as national, implications. Any triumph of the “Anglo-Saxon virtues” of moderation, good sense and the spirit of compromise would have been reactionary in the context of the mid nineteenth-century world. Such a compromise would have been the counterpart to Bismarck’s celebrated “marriage of iron and rye,” that is the alliance of reactionary, urban industrialists with brutal, quasi-feudal planters (the Junkers), the compromise that underlay German unification, industrialization and authoritarianism.106 What distinguished America was not only the promissory note set down for racial equality, but its willingness to use violence to cripple the planter class, who were never compensated for their losses. The differences between the peaceful but authoritarian German route to a modern economy, and the bloody but progressive American route showed itself during World War Two when the two countries faced off against one another, this time as fascism versus democracy.

When reconciliation between North and South was achieved, the issue of racial equality was again pushed outside of the political arena, in good part through the extralegal violence of the Ku Klux Klan. The abolitionists were discredited, the war described as avoidable, the differences as reconcilable, Reconstruction portrayed as a “disastrous mistake,” and slavery remembered “as an unfortunate but benign institution that was damaging for whites morally but helped civilize and Christianize ‘African savages.’ ” The myth of the lost cause, according to which the South had fought for the principle of state’s rights, and not for slavery, redeemed Southern honor and came to dominate historical writing. In the late nineteenth century this myth was

reinforced at countless Memorial Day celebrations, where white Union and Confederate veterans shook hands and recalled their collective heroism, while survivors of the 200,000 black Union soldiers and sailors crucial in helping win the war were not welcome. Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner elected President after the Civil War, reinforced the same message to the white veterans during the huge 50th reunion at Gettysburg in 1913.¹⁰⁷

And yet, terrible and protracted as the counterrevolution regarding race was, the abolitionist ideal of racial equality was never eradicated from the national memory. It survived, as subsequent American lefts grasped, as a “promissory note,” “for future use.”

Meanwhile, the struggle between capital and labor was supplanting the struggle over slavery. Earlier, trade union leaders had appealed to the abolitionists to join forces and condemn the “lords of the loom” (i.e., the mill-owners) along with the “lords of the lash” (the plantation owners), but the abolitionists consistently refused. Rather than link the critique of the slave power to a critique of capital, they contrasted the evils of slavery to the merits of a market system. According to Eric Foner, for labor leaders, slavery was one evil among others; for the abolitionists, any problems labor faced were rooted in slavery. Abolitionists opposed factory owners for their proslavery stance, but not for their treatment of workers.108

The abolitionists were right to understand that slavery had to be dealt with before capitalism was addressed, but wrong to fail to see that an exploitative labor system would block racial equality. Once emancipation was achieved, they didn’t mount a continuing effort to build the social and economic prerequisites for equality. With the exception of the reformer Wendell Phillips, and the Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who supported the idea of “forty acres and a mule,” the freedmen’s need for land, capital, equal education and other resources was ignored. As Garrison claimed, “In a republican government society must, in the nature of things, be full of inequalities. But these can exist without … even a semblance of oppression.”¹⁰⁹ Nonetheless, unleashed by the war, industrial capitalism, far from delivering the producerist democracy that Garrison and other advocates of free labor expected, degraded the ex-slaves by using them as strike-breakers, underpaying them, firing them whenever the profit motive dictated, relegating them to the worst schools and the worst neighborhoods, and denying them political representation.

Garrison’s views notwithstanding, there was great continuity between the first left and the second. Karl Marx, who covered the Civil War as a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Northern cause, albeit without recognizing the centrality of racial equality. For Marx, the war was about slavery; he mocked British liberals who viewed it as a tariff or banking conflict. In 1861 he told Engels that while Wall Street would tolerate slaveholders, “self-working farmers” would not. In 1864 he congratulated Abraham Lincoln upon reelection: “If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your reelection is Death to Slavery.” Breaking the power of the slaveholders, Marx believed, would open the way toward the “really revolutionary path” of free, self-owning labor, and eventually socialism. Engels elaborated, “Once slavery, the greatest shackle on the political development of the United States, has been broken, the country is bound to receive an impetus from which it will acquire a different position in world history.”110 This prophecy was in fact to be realized, especially during the Great Depression and World War Two.