Reform movements are interwoven into American culture. Such lasting American characteristics as distrust of government, regional differences, millennialist religion, natural rights theory, individualism (and fears of it), class divisions, and republicanism are tied to the nation’s reform impulse. Reform springs from a variety of motives and social classes. It aims to increase morality, help the downtrodden, and expand democracy. It also has ups and downs, which can lead reformers and historians to varying and contradictory conclusions regarding a particular movement’s success or failure. Especially in regard to the pre–Civil War movement to abolish slavery, the issue of violent means has had a central role in determining such conclusions. Certain other American reform movements, such as prohibition, labor organization, and civil rights, are likewise, to varying degrees, associated with violence. But because of abolitionism’s relationship to the antebellum sectional struggle, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, issues of violence have most affected perceptions of it.
A major American reform era began during the 1810s and continued into the Civil War years. Antebellum reformers hoped to transform the country. A wide range of campaigns flourished: to distribute Bibles, save souls, end mail delivery on Sundays, improve eating habits, discourage alcohol consumption, promote public education, make the penal system more humane, end the flogging of sailors, and raise the status of women. Of them all, the movement to abolish slavery was by far the oldest, largest, most vociferous, and most threatening to the status quo. As historian Ronald G. Walters put it more than thirty years ago, abolitionists “envisioned themselves as part of some great procession stretching across the centuries—soldiers in the long march of Protestantism, Reason, Progress, [and] Democracy.”1 Self-righteous, deadly serious, self-critical, and not easily disillusioned, abolitionists embraced reform as the hard work of a lifetime. They equated failure with damnation.
In 1775, Philadelphia Quakers organized the first abolition society in the world. Although this society failed to persist in its original form, the early abolitionists succeeded in fewer than thirty years. Through peaceful means, they helped end slavery in the northeast—immediately in a few states and gradually in the rest. This success, together with the ban on slavery in the Northwest Territory encoded in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, helped make slavery a North-South sectional issue. So did Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton gin. Before this invention, most Americans outside South Carolina and Georgia assumed slavery would fade away. But as the cotton gin sped processing of short-staple cotton, cultivation of the crop expanded in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina, and spread westward into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and (eventually) Texas. As a result, black slavery became the direct basis of the South’s economy and indirectly essential to the economy of much of the Northeast.
Meanwhile, religious revivalism, northern self-interest, and black demands for racial justice expanded abolitionism. By 1830, a more radical movement had emerged. Led by William Lloyd Garrison and his weekly newspaper, The Liberator, “modern abolitionists” called for the immediate, peaceful, abolition of slavery in the South and equal rights for African Americans. In 1833, Garrison organized these proponents of immediate abolition as the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), which sought to convince Northerners and Southerners that, for the sake of their souls and to avoid massive slave revolt, human bondage had to end quickly. In the AASS’s 1833 Declaration of Sentiments, immediatists not only limited themselves to nonviolent means of reform, they pledged to discourage slaves from rising against their masters. By the late 1830s, as abolitionists divided over tactics, the Garrisonian faction embraced a more extreme form of pacifism known as nonresistance.2
Yet from the late 1820s onward, some abolitionists justified violence against slavery. Black abolitionist David Walker, in his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, published in Boston in 1829, called on enslaved black men to rise up against masters who assaulted their wives and daughters. By the early 1840s, abolitionists were going beyond rhetoric, arming themselves as they helped slaves escape their masters. Prominent among this group were Charles T. Torrey, a white abolitionist from Massachusetts who lived in Washington, D.C., during the early 1840s, and his associate Thomas Smallwood, a free black Washington native. The two men organized an escape network that stretched from northern Virginia to Canada, and Torrey (at least) carried pistols.3
By 1849, the prominent black abolitionist Frederick Douglass had shed his former pacifism, declaring: “I should welcome the intelligence tomorrow … that the slaves had risen in the South, and that … sable arms … were engaged in spreading death and destruction there.” By the early 1850s, radical political abolitionists, centered in western New York and led by Gerrit Smith, asserted that violence had to play a role in ending slavery. “If the American revolutionists had excuse for shedding but one drop of blood,” Smith exclaimed in 1850, “then have the American slaves excuse for making blood flow ‘even to the horse-bridles.’” Beginning in 1855, fighting between antislavery and proslavery forces in Kansas Territory played a role. Long-time pacifist Angelina Grimké Weld embraced “baptiz[ing] liberty in blood [in Kansas] if it must be so.” In 1856, Smith observed, “There is not virtue enough in the American people to bring slavery to a bloodless termination; and all that remains for them is to bring it to a bloody one.”4
During the late 1850s, some nonresistants changed their minds about violent means. In 1857, Henry C. Wright, a Garrisonian pacifist, told the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society that “We owe it as our duty to ourselves and to humanity to excite every slave to rebellion against his master.” Such rhetoric was not good enough for John Brown. Emerging from a Boston Garrisonian meeting in early 1859, Brown scoffed: “Talk! talk! talk!—that will never set the slave free.”5 These violent abolitionist tendencies culminated, later that year, in Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The raid, along with the election to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln—an antislavery (but not abolitionist) Republican—in November 1860, helped push the Lower South into secession between December 1860 and February 1861.6
By the time of his execution in December 1959, if not earlier, John Brown had come to believe that only bloodshed could reform America. A decade earlier, Karl Marx had reached a similar conclusion regarding all capitalistic societies. By the late 1850s, Garrison and highly influential evangelical Lewis Tappan were in a minority of abolitionists who clung to nonviolence.
As the seven Lower South states seceded from the Union during the winter of 1860–61, following Lincoln’s election in November 1860, most abolitionists preferred to let them go. But peace principles did not shape their outlook. Instead abolitionists believed it was preferable to let the Lower South states leave the Union than for Congress to enact a proslavery compromise to entice them back in. Abolitionists also hoped that the secession of the Lower South would provoke a successful slave rebellion, accomplishing the destruction of slavery. Douglass voiced these views when he declared in January 1861 that “if the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders; if it can only be stuck together and held together by a new drain on the negro’s blood; if the North is to forswear the exercise of all rights incompatible with the safety and perpetuity of slavery … then will every right-minded man and women in the land say, let the Union perish, and perish forever.”7
This abolitionist point of view evaporated in April 1861 with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for Union troops. In response to these events, many abolitionists endorsed a war they believed would end slavery. Henry B. Stanton, an AASS stalwart during the 1830s and a political abolitionist during the 1840s, told his wife, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “I hear Old John Brown knocking on the lid of his coffin & shouting ‘Let me out,’ ‘let me out!!’ The doom of slavery is at hand. It is to be wiped out in blood. Amen!” Oliver Johnson, a Garrisonian journalist, remarked more directly: “In spite of every effort to control or qualify it, it must be, essentially, a war of freedom against slavery.” The next day Garrison advised Johnson, “It is no time for minute criticism of Lincoln, Republicanism, or even the other Parties, now that they are fusing for a death grapple with the Southern slave oligarchy; for they are instruments in the hands of God to carry forward and help achieve the great objectives of emancipation. … the war is fearfully to scourge the nation, but mercy will be mingled with judgment, and grand results are to follow.”8
After the Union defeat at Bull Run, Douglass hoped northerners would “now call not only for vengeance and righteous retribution [against the Confederacy], but for … the abolition of slavery. … by the simple process of calling upon the blacks of the South to rally under the Star-Spangled Banner, and work and fight for freedom.” At about the same time, Tappan told the American Peace Society that, while “all war was contrary to the Gospel, unnecessary, and wicked,” the continued existence of slavery would be worse. For the Union government to give up fighting, Tappan noted, would “perpetuate human bondage, the chief cause of the war.”9
As time passed, even abolitionists more committed to pacifism than Garrison and Tappan began to lean toward such sentiments. Sarah Grimké, a Quaker, had for decades opposed all violence, yet in November 1863, she told Garrison, “This war, the holiest ever waged, is emphatically God’s war; and whether the nation will or not, He will carry it on … until every American enjoys the rights claimed for him in our Declaration of Independence.” Grimké’s brother-in-law Theodore Weld, another long-term pacifist, likewise declared, “I profoundly believe in the righteousness of such a war as this, on its anti-slavery side.” To a friend, he added that “[we] exault … in this mighty Northern uprising, not withstanding its mixtures of motives and base alloys and half truths and whole lies. … The elements of a vast moral revolution are all aglow in the surging mass. A national religious revival better deserving the name, than anything that has preceded it. Simple right is getting such a hearing as never before on this continent.”10
Abolitionists increasingly pressed a reluctant Lincoln to announce that Union armies fought for black emancipation as well as to preserve the Union; they also argued that the Northern armies must enlist black men. “The war at its foundation is all about the black man,” stated Elizure Wright, an independent political abolitionist, in May 1861, “… and before the war is through the black man is almost certain to be fighting for himself.” That June, Douglass urged abolitionists to “give … no support or continence” to the Union war effort “until the government shall … place itself openly and unequivocally on the side of freedom.” At an abolitionist meeting on July 4th at Framingham, Massachusetts, Stephen S. Foster, a Garrisonian, urged abolitionists to convince Northerners that the Union had to make emancipation a war aim as a means of defeating the Confederacy. The North, he maintained, could not “crush out treason without hurting the traitors,” and the way to hurt slaveholders was “to … dash against [slavery] with all the force of its own violence.”11
Through such words, and through lobbying the president and Congress, abolitionists helped shape Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Union decision to enlist black troops. They also led Northern public opinion toward accepting these measures. Abolitionist men and women also led by example, going to the South to serve among former slaves on plantations and in refugee camps and working as nurses, administrators, and teachers. Black and white abolitionists raised black Union troops, and younger white abolitionist men led them in battle. Abolitionists also urged the formation of what in 1865 became the Freedmen’s Bureau. They inspired the Thirteenth Amendment, shaped the Fourteenth, and advocated the Fifteenth, amendments that, among other provisions, ended slavery, recognized black civil rights, and gave black men the right to vote.12
By January 1862, some abolitionists believed the Civil War would end their struggle by ending slavery. They prepared to stop agitating in the North and lobbying in Washington. J. Miller McKim, a Garrisonian from Philadelphia, assumed slavery would disintegrate as a byproduct of war, making further abolitionist effort superfluous. A month later, Maria Weston Chapman, a close associate of Garrison, agreed. She believed younger generations would overpower slavery’s legacies.13
By the end of 1863 (nearly a year after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation), abolitionists had begun to congratulate themselves on their success. In November, Garrison, anticipating the AASS’s thirtieth anniversary meeting, credited the organization with inducing Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. “The Society will have the sublime privilege to announce, as the result, primarily of its disinterested, patriotic, and Christian labors,” Garrison concluded, “the emancipation of THREE MILLION THREE HUNDRED THOUSANDS SLAVES, by the fiat of the American Government on the 1st of January last.” At the anniversary meeting, Mary Grew, of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, proclaimed: “The work of the American abolitionists is accomplished.” She then added, “Verily, it is fitting that we … grasp one another’s hands in fraternal congratulation.” Abolitionist self-congratulation continued into the postwar period. When he ceased publishing The Liberator in December 1865, Garrison acknowledged that “a mighty work of enlightenment and regeneration” remained to be accomplished in the South. He nevertheless declared the abolitionist objective, “the extermination of chattel slavery, … gloriously consummated.”14
Nearly a decade later, Douglass sent a letter to the aging abolitionists attending an 1874 reunion in Chicago. “No class of the American people,” he wrote, “can look toward the sunset of life with a larger measure of satisfaction than the Abolitionists.” According to Douglass, “they ha[d] done a great work—the great work of the century. They ha[d] given the American slaves their freedom and the American people the possibility of a country.” The abolitionists had, in Douglass’s estimation, “delivered.” They had imperiled “everything but honor for the freedom of others.” Douglass’s audience did not need this encouragement. In reminiscences published between the late 1860s and the 1880s, abolitionists took pride in having brought on a war that led to emancipation. They portrayed themselves as heroes in a successful struggle against slavery. “When all the animosities excited by the great conflict have passed away, and the historian comes to tell the story with perfect impartiality,” declared the abolitionist journalist Oliver Johnson in 1879, “the character and fame of Garrison will shine forth with new lustre. … as the founder and the leader of the movement by which American slavery was exterminated, and the fetters of four million of American slaves were forever broken.” Another abolitionist journalist, James Freeman Clarke, proudly asserted in 1883, “In every way we have reason to be thankful for the great progress throughout the whole Southern country by the white and the colored people.”15
Despite such self-congratulation, however, many abolitionists, black and white, came to believe they had failed to accomplish one, or perhaps both, of their major goals. They lamented that the termination of legal slavery had not led white Americans to accept equal rights for African Americans.16 Most surviving abolitionists concluded that, while they had secured emancipation, they had failed to bring about moral reformation in white opinion. Returning to pacifism, abolitionists (in contrast to John Brown and Karl Marx) asserted that only peaceful means could produce such a reformation.
A few abolitionists had never deserted pacifism. As early as November 1861, Parker Pillsbury, a Garrisonian loyalist turned critic, denounced the Lincoln administration for coming to “this doctrine of the abolition of slavery at last as ‘a military necessity.’” Pillsbury claimed (incorrectly) that military emancipation “never was successfully done, and while God lives and reigns, it never can be done,” and contended that violent abolition was “the most God-insulting doctrine ever proclaimed.” In January 1862, abolitionist journalist Lydia Maria Child worried that if emancipation resulted from “a ‘war necessity,’ everything must go wrong [because] there is no heart or conscience on the subject.”17
In December 1863, two colleagues of Pillsbury and Child, Stephen Foster and Abigail Kelley Foster, warned that a successful Union war for emancipation would not guarantee equal rights for African Americans. Stephen claimed that Lincoln cared only “for the white man and the perpetuity of the Federal Government,” while Abigail added that Northern opinion on black emancipation had changed “not from the highest motives” but from “military necessity.” Douglass, despite his support for the war, shared some of Foster’s concerns. While admitting that “I am one of those who believed that it is the mission of this war to free every slave in the United States,” he predicted that ending “prejudice against color” and gaining full political rights for black men would be more difficult.18
In June 1865 (shortly after the formal end of the war), Stephen Foster pointed to the gap between legal emancipation for slaves and their full assimilation into American society at the thirty-second anniversary meeting of the AASS. Reminding his associates that they had once “discarded the idea of forcible emancipation,” he noted that the U.S. victory in the war had produced “none other than emancipation effected by physical violence.” In “a forced emancipation, the moment the force is withdrawn, the crime will be repeated,” he warned. “The only hope for the negro is in imprinting the law of justice upon the American heart.” Five months later, Henry C. Wright echoed this sentiment, declaring that “military power” could never protect “human rights.” Slavery had died, but “its spirit and its results live[d].” The abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips added a further warning in 1869: “Once let public thought float off from the great issue of the war,” he asserted, “and it will take perhaps more than a generation to bring it back again. … Unless some remedy is devised, the negro will stand in peril and use his rights only at great personal hazard for many years to come.” Many abolitionists argued that no true reformation of sentiment could occur when military strategy alone had led a Northern majority to support emancipation. Black rights, they predicted, would exist in the South only so long as military force protected them.19
As white Southern resistance to Reconstruction and black rights intensified, abolitionists’ doubts about the success of their cause proliferated. Samuel Joseph May, who before the war had worked with Garrison and Gerrit Smith, charged that “our Government has been guilty of great injustice to the colored population of the South, who were all loyal [to the Union] throughout the war.” African Americans, according to May, “should not have been left as they have been, in a great measure, at the mercy of their former masters.” In 1874, Garrison asserted that efforts at reconciliation between the North and South promoted “the old dragon spirit of slavery, and perpetuat[ed] caste distinctions by laws.” In 1876, Amos Dresser, who had been an early associate of Theodore Weld and had suffered a beating by a proslavery mob in Tennessee, added: “There yet remains a great work to be done to eradicate the spirit of slavery and the spirit of caste so deeply rooted in the heart, a work that can be fully accomplished only by the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That same year, while acknowledging that the Civil War had produced emancipation, Garrison asked, “What special credit may we [abolitionists] claim for this, seeing it was done expressly as a ‘military necessity, in order to preserve the Union, and not because of the wrongfulness of oppression?” He advised abolitionists, “If we rejoice at all, let it be with contrite hearts that we have not been utterly consumed.”20
Abolitionists either forgot or repudiated their support of military emancipation. In 1884, Douglass summed up their retrospective lament: “Liberty came to the freedmen of the United States not in mercy, but in wrath, not by moral choice but by military necessity, not by the generous action of the people among whom they were to live, and whose good-will was essential to the success of the measure, but by strangers, foreigners, invaders, trespassers, aliens, and enemies…. Nothing was to have been expected other than what has happened.” Unlike Douglass, Kentucky abolitionist Cassius M. Clay had never been a pacifist. He briefly served as a Union general. But in 1886, he agreed with Douglass concerning the ineffectiveness of force. Clay observed that “force has been tried” and only enhanced white Southern resistance to black rights. According to Clay, abolition by war “was the chief cause of [white] southern solidity [sic]” during Reconstruction. He believed that “the disease [of racism was] too great and widespread for such remedy.”21
From the late nineteenth century to the mid–twentieth century, historians overlooked both the abolitionists’ impact during the Civil War and their second thoughts about the war. Largely because of the North-South reconciliation effort that began after the war, even late-nineteenth-century historians who recognized the role of abolitionists in causing the Civil War ignored their role during the war. Because of their racial bias and support for sectional reconciliation, even historians who favored the Union cause ignored the war’s failure to secure lasting rights for African Americans.22
Since then, most writing on abolitionists has centered on the antebellum years. Those were the years during which the North and South moved toward war. And into the 1960s, despite their lack of attention to the abolitionist role during the Civil War, historians asserted a major abolitionist role in causing the war and thereby achieving emancipation. In 1892, James Ford Rhodes wrote about abolitionists in the first volume of his seven-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. Asking readers to “picture … [a] process of [abolitionist] engagement, of discussion, of persuasion, going on for twenty-five years, with an ever-increasing momentum,” Rhodes concluded that “… we cannot resist the conviction that this agitation had its part, and a great part, in the first election of Lincoln.” During the 1930s, historians Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond asserted that the morally oriented abolitionism of the 1830s underlay and lived on in the antislavery politics of the Republican Party.23
As Barnes conceived it, “Throughout the later agitation from the [eighteen] forties to the ‘sixties the doctrine of the antislavery host … continued in the moral tenets of the original antislavery [abolitionist] creed. In this crusading spirit their support of men and measures was constantly maintained until 1860, when, county by county, the antislavery [abolitionist] areas gave Abraham Lincoln the votes which made him President.” Dumond went further, portraying Lincoln as an abolitionist, “thoroughly sound on the fundamental principles of abolitionist doctrine.” According to Dumond, those principles were “that the subject of slavery was not a domestic concern of the Southern States, that it was a moral and political evil which menaced the rights of free men, was contrary to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and a violation of eternal principles of right.”24
The revisionist and consensus schools of historians, which dominated studies of the Civil War era during the long period from the 1920s through the 1950s, did not share the positive view of the impact of abolitionists before the Civil War asserted by Rhodes, Barnes, and Dumond. Instead, the reactionary revisionist and conservative consensus historians held abolitionists to have been “irresponsible fanatics,” who irrationally held slaveholders responsible for Northern social evils. In 1942, revisionist Avery O. Craven stated that the movement “arose out of apprehension engendered by changes” caused by industrialization in New England and New York. Slaveholders, in Craven’s view, did “scapegoat service” for class antagonism against a new Northern business “aristocracy.”25
Still, these anti-abolitionist historians agreed that abolitionists had played a major role in pushing the country toward sectional war. According to Craven, “Abolition[ists] threatened to produce a race problem which had in large part been solved by the institution of slavery, and caused a move for [Southern] independence.” In The Civil War and Reconstruction (published in 1937 and the best-selling Civil War history textbook of its time), James G. Randall wrote that abolitionists introduced “the avenging force of Puritanism in politics” and argued that it was “a major cause of the conflict.”26 The difference between the revisionist and consensus historians on the one side and Rhodes, Barnes, and Dumond on the other was that the former groups believed the war to have been a mistake. They regarded slavery as a “benign” institution that would have ended peacefully if not for abolitionist agitation.
It took the civil rights movement and Kenneth M. Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution, published in 1956, to encourage historians to reject this particularly negative view of abolitionists. Stampp portrayed slavery as a brutal system of forced labor. He quoted a North Carolina master, who asserted that “slavery and Tyranny must go together and … there is no such thing as having an obedient and useful slave, without the painful exercise of undue and tyrannical authority. … The power of the Master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” In this context, abolitionist demands for an end to slavery seemed rational rather than irrational. Not long after the publication of Stampp’s book, boycotts, sit-ins, and freedom rides designed to end legal racial segregation began in the South. These efforts on behalf of black rights suggested to sympathetic historians that studying the abolitionists could provide insight into and support for the freedom struggle, as well as clarifying the causes of the Civil War and (more generally) the effectiveness of radical reform in American society.27
Stampp’s book, combined with civil rights activism, led a group of liberal historians known as neoabolitionists to reject the revisionist and consensus portrait of abolitionism. Neoabolitionists supported and often participated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement for change. Like King, and like most abolitionists before the 1850s and immediately after the Civil War, neoabolitionists believed only peaceful efforts could bring lasting social change.28
Since the 1960s, the overwhelming tendency among historians of the Civil War era has been to emphasize the positive impact of the civil rights movement on the neoabolitionists’ view of the abolitionists. But the civil rights–era belief in nonviolence, renewed comprehension of the role of white racism, and awareness of race-based inequality in America had an equally significant negative impact on the neoabolitionist estimation of the character of the abolitionist movement. The first indication of this negative impact emerged during the 1950s, as historians (after generations of neglect) took an interest in the sense of failure expressed by elderly abolitionists after the Civil War. In 1959, Merton L. Dillon, professor of history at Ohio State University and perhaps the first neoabolitionist historian, published an article entitled “The Failure of the American Abolitionists.” Dillon centered his argument on the abolitionists’ goal of equal rights for African Americans and dated to the late 1830s the start of the abolitionists’ failure to achieve that goal. In his view, “the work of the abolitionists as moral reformers had practically ended by 1844.” During these years, most abolitionists moved from nonviolent moral suasion to independent political action, recognizing the right of the U.S. government to use force. Dillon linked this change to focus on white Northern self-interest.
The trend toward abolitionist political engagement, Dillon believed, increased the likelihood of sectional war based on factors other than moral commitment to black rights. Sounding like the post–Civil War abolitionists, Dillon noted that the war destroyed slavery without creating “a society in which the principles of Christianity [prevailed] … in which men of all colors could live together in harmony and equality.” Dillon held abolitionists responsible for this. “By failing [after 1840] to maintain its original [moral and nonviolent] position,” Dillon asserted, “the antislavery movement abandoned all hope of achieving its original goals of ending racial prejudice and persuading slaveholders to abandon their sin.” Force “might end slavery,” but it could not “end prejudice.”29
In 1964, James M. McPherson published The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction. This book remains the only comprehensive study of abolitionists during the Civil War and Reconstruction. McPherson acknowledged the influence of the civil rights movement on his book by dedicating it to “all those who [worked during the 1950s and 1960s] … to achieve the abolitionist goal of equal rights.” King’s march on Washington, sit-ins, freedom rides, confrontation between the North and South, and violence directed against civil rights activists inspired McPherson. He perceived “parallels between the events of [his] times and those of exactly a century earlier.” He claimed that what he “witnessed and experienced in the 1960s” led him to investigate what “the civil-rights activists of the Civil War era—the abolitionists,” achieved.30
Implicit in this approach are the issues of abolitionist impact and relevance. In regard to impact, if the abolitionists achieved their goals of emancipation and equal rights, why was another struggle for equality necessary a century later? In regard to relevance, if such dedicated reformers as the abolitionists failed, what chance had their modern counterparts for success? McPherson in 1964 expressed some optimism on both issues, asserting, first, that while the abolitionists during the 1860s did not “forge or control events,” they “achieve[d] most of [their] objectives,” and second, that the abolitionists were models for modern civil rights activists.31
Yet while McPherson agreed with the abolitionists’ dominant view in 1870 that they could look back “with considerable satisfaction … upon the achievements of the past decade,” he had reservations. Like abolitionists after the Civil War and like Dillon, he concluded that efforts resting on force and expediency could not sustain black rights in the face of white Southern resistance and efforts for sectional reconciliation backed by the U.S. government. He did not fully concur with Dillon’s observation that this amounted to the “failure of American abolitionists,” however; rather than admit abolitionist failure, he claimed that the “American people” failed because they did not follow abolitionist leadership. That leadership, McPherson asserted, lived on in the civil rights movement. This later movement, he believed, had “a greater chance of permanent success than did its counterpart in the 1860s,” precisely because the civil rights movement “built partly on the foundations laid down more than a century ago by the abolitionists.” The abolitionists’ “spirit,” McPherson asserted, “still pervades the struggle for racial justice.”32
During the dozen years following the publication of The Struggle for Equality, three historians wrote book-length studies of American abolitionism: Carleton Mabee’s Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1850 through the Civil War (1970), Dillon’s The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (1974), and James Brewer Stewart’s Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1976). As their titles indicate, these books (unlike McPherson’s) did not focus exclusively on the abolitionists during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Instead they looked more broadly at abolitionism into the 1860s and 1870s.
In light of Mabee’s use of the phrase “nonviolent abolitionists” in his subtitle, it is not surprising that he, most carefully of the three historians, described the transition in 1861 among some abolitionists from pacifism to support of a war for union and emancipation. Mabee also defined most explicitly black abolitionists as a distinct group, which he contended had less ambivalence toward the use of force than white abolitionists. But all three historians emphasized the abolitionists’ united efforts during the Civil War to foster Northern public support for a war for emancipation and equal rights. All three likewise agreed with McPherson—and the abolitionists themselves—that the movement achieved a great deal. In Stewart’s words, abolitionists succeeded in pressing the Union to act on “moral conviction, not military expediency.” Mabee went so far as to mention an 1883 recollection that Lincoln in 1865 had declared, “I have been only an instrument. The logic and moral powers of Garrison and the antislavery people of the country and the army have done all.”33
Dillon and Stewart emphasized the abolitionists’ campaign for the Thirteenth Amendment, their actions in the South to promote black education and civil rights, their role in creating the Freedmen’s Bureau, and their positive impact on Reconstruction. In addition, both historians asserted that abolitionists drew together during the war and became more practical, despite their differences in 1864 over Lincoln’s reelection and in 1865 over whether or not to disband the American Anti-Slavery Society. Like McPherson, Dillon and Stewart presented these differences as resulting from an internal debate over whether the abolitionists had completed their work or should continue, not over whether they had succeeded or failed.34
Yet Mabee, Dillon, and Stewart were less circumspect than McPherson regarding abolitionist failure. Mabee recognized that some abolitionists had concluded, even as the war began, that they had failed. He noted that after the war many abolitionists “came to sense the [Union] victory was hollow,” that “‘forcible emancipation’ would not last.” Mabee agreed with the postwar abolitionists that in neither the North nor South had they prepared “most whites for giving genuine freedom to the Negroes.” Dillon observed correctly that, as Northern support for black rights dwindled during Reconstruction, abolitionists blamed themselves for not changing “moral values.” Emancipation, in Dillon’s opinion, “served only to reinforce the dominion of the ruling order.” Stewart went further, claiming that Union armies, African American action, and a Northern desire to destroy slaveholders’ political power (rather than abolitionist influence) led to emancipation. Very like the postwar abolitionists, he concluded that “warfare between irreconcilable cultures, not moral suasion … intervened between the master and his slave. Consequently, emancipation left America not clothed in righteousness, but reconfirmed in its white supremacism.”35
Another factor, in addition to reliance on abolitionist second thoughts, shaped Mabee’s, Dillon’s, and Stewart’s analyses of the movement’s impact in the 1860s: all three books reflected a liberal pessimism concerning reform that began during the late 1960s. Many liberals feared that the civil rights struggle would end in failure and that other mid-twentieth-century reform movements (including those against the Vietnam War and in support of women’s rights) would share that fate. Black violence protesting discrimination contributed to this pessimism, much as antislavery violence had a century earlier. Urban black riots began in the Watts district of Los Angeles during the summer of 1965. Rioting intensified in 1967, with outbreaks in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan. In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder, headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner (and known as the Kerner Commission), warned that the nation was moving “toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”36
That same year, George Wallace campaigned as a segregationist candidate for president and Republican Richard Nixon unveiled his “southern strategy.” Despite Nixon’s declaration that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, the war continued into the 1970s. There were fears that Nixon would violate civil liberties and civil rights. Conservative think tanks proliferated, the religious right organized, and a backlash against the women’s movement spread.37
Mabee, Dillon, and Stewart’s view of the fate of reform efforts in the Civil War era and their perception of reactionary threats during their time reinforced each other. Mabee doubted the United States’ ability to deal effectively with social and racial issues, arguing that “in the nineteenth century … black-white relations threatened to destroy the nation, and they still do in the twentieth century.” He reflected that “history sometimes presents terrible dilemmas for which there are no solutions.” Reformers in the 1970s, he observed, could try and could “largely fail, as the abolitionists did before us.”38 Dillon noted that reformist successors to the abolitionists in the late nineteenth century, in the women’s rights, temperance, anti-prostitution, and labor movements, had failed to “transform the character of their age.” He warned that just as the equal rights “promises of the Civil War era … had not been kept,” a similar outcome might prevail regarding the promises made in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite the achievements of the civil rights movement, he claimed, “reformers [had] once more … reached a dead end.” Stewart demonstrated slightly more optimism, expressing hope that even though “urban segregation ha[d] replaced the plantation, … modern day reformers might learn from the abolitionists’ mistakes.”39
Pessimistic as they were, Mabee, Dillon, and Stewart sought to understand the abolitionist role in American political events stretching from the 1830s into the 1870s. In their view, while abolitionists had failed to achieve real emancipation and equal rights for blacks, their efforts had had a significant positive impact in several respects. Yet, even as these three scholars wrote, two factors led most historians of American abolitionism to conclude that abolitionists had failed much more profoundly to influence the major events of their time.
The first factor resulted from a neoabolitionist attempt to refute revisionist and consensus portrayals of abolitionists as irrational fanatics who pushed the United States into a needless civil war. Four decades before Mabee, Dillon, and Stewart’s books appeared, historians Charles and Mary Beard found no place for abolitionist impact on what the Beards regarded as an antebellum class struggle between the “planting aristocracy of the South” and the “capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West.” During the 1960s, some neoabolitionists reached a similar conclusion. In defense of abolitionist rationality, these historians portrayed white abolitionists not as radical moralists, but as representatives of a rising entrepreneurial class, who embraced values associated with Northern industrialization. In this view, white abolitionists were motivated not by sympathy for African Americans in slavery but by commitment to wage labor, social mobility, and individualism. Self-interest, not morality, led white abolitionists to condemn the South’s traditional values, agricultural economy, and primitive labor system.40
The second factor arose from the racial polarization and violence that affected intellectual discourse during the late 1960s. Within this context, neoabolitionists questioned white abolitionists’ commitment to racial justice. It seemed that even as white abolitionists decried racial injustice, many of them could not free themselves from prejudice. They failed to achieve true emancipation because most of them were racists. Well into the 1980s, most historians of the antislavery movement contended that white abolitionist racism alienated black abolitionists, frustrated black aspirations, divided the abolition movement, and undermined its objectives.41
How could such a limited and conflicted effort have either a positive or negative impact on major events? How could abolitionism have been a factor in causing the Civil War and emancipation? As early as 1965, when historians still regarded abolitionists as radicals, the long-standing view that they had had political influence was already waning among those who studied them. According to the preeminent neoabolitionist historian Martin Duberman, “The abolitionist movement never became a major channel of Northern antislavery sentiment. It remained in 1860 what it had been in 1830: the small but not still voice of radical reform.” Four years later, Larry Gara traced the origins of the Republican Party to Northern fear of Southern political dominance, “rather than to any growth of … humanitarian consideration for the slave as an oppressed human being.”42
During the 1970s, historians of the abolitionist movement returned to emphasizing its moral basis, while furthering the perception that it did not seriously influence the sectional conflict. They described immediatism as a surrogate religion or an attempt at social control in the North. As historians grew certain that abolitionists had exerted no positive influence on American social and political development, they turned their studies inward, examining abolitionists narrowly as members of antislavery social clusters, small religious denominations, and tiny ineffective political parties. Rather than center on the abolitionists’ impact on American political history and Civil War causation, many historians concentrated on what it meant to an individual to be an abolitionist. Others relied on huge collections of abolitionist writings to explore gender, race, and religion in antebellum Northern society.43
In 1979, historian Donald M. Scott wrote, “Immediatism was less a program of what to do about slavery than … a ‘disposition,’ a state of being in which the heart and will were set irrevocably against slavery … making immediatism the sign of whether or not a person was a saved Christian.” In 1981, Lawrence J. Friedman, who studied abolitionist social clusters, went so far as to contend that “sectional conflict, Civil War, and legal emancipation would probably have occurred even if there had been no active abolition movement.”44
Since 1981, most historians of the abolitionist movement have continued to explore its inner relationships, its reflection of cultural developments, and it revelations concerning gender and race. For example, Paul Goodman’s Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (1998) analyzes (with little reference to national politics) the development, positive and negative, of white abolitionist attitudes toward African Americans. John Stauffer’s The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002) explores the friendship among four abolitionists, two black and two white, rather than their impact on sectionalism.45
Nearly all the essays in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (2006), edited by Stauffer and Timothy Patrick McCarthy, likewise ignore abolitionist agency in the sectional struggle. Instead the essayists deal with the impact of black abolitionists on the movement, abolitionist use of photography, the role of the printing press in the movement, and the portrayal of abolitionists in twentieth-century films. On a positive note, essays in Prophets of Protest and in Richard M. Newman’s The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic reveal how black abolitionists shaped the entire abolition movement. In doing so, these studies counteract the 1970s interpretation of white abolitionists as driven by a racial prejudice little different from that of other white Northerners.46
Most historians of American abolitionism and the Civil War era have nevertheless remained leery of addressing the abolitionist involvement in the Civil War. In Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States (1976), Richard H. Sewell admirably develops the impact of abolitionism on antebellum politics. But the book stops with the election of 1860 and the start of secession. Jonathan H. Earle’s Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil (2004) stops six years short of the Civil War. In Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (2005), Bruce Laurie deals with Massachusetts political abolitionism, without reference to the war. Edward B. Rugemer’s The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (2008), despite its subtitle, avoids analysis of events leading to the war.
James Oakes’s The Radical and the Republican (2007), a dual political biography of Douglass and Lincoln, does extend into the Civil War years. But Oakes maintains that Lincoln’s practical politics, not Douglass’s abolitionism, achieved emancipation. Similarly, Oakes’s Freedom National (2013) argues that the Republican Party’s commitment to denationalize slavery had more to do with ending slavery than had organized abolitionism.47 In Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (1991), Wendy Hamond Venet concentrates on the Women’s National Loyal League. But while she implies that this organization had impact, she also suggests that its radicalism limited its effectiveness. W. Caleb McDaniel’s Problem of Slavery in the Age of Democracy: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (2013) concentrates on internal disputes among Garrisonians rather than on their influence on Union war aims. Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) describes a more profound abolitionist impact on Lincoln’s political development and on Northern opinion during the Civil War. But it is especially lamentable that histories of black abolitionists stop short of the war. This is the case with Benjamin Quarles’s classic Black Abolitionists (1969), R. J. M. Blackett’s Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (1983), and Shirley J. Yee’s Black Women Abolitionists: A Study of Activism (1992).48
What will it take to get more historians of American abolitionism and of the Civil War era to once again regard abolitionists as influential? Perhaps nothing can achieve this, since it is difficult to deny that abolitionist efforts failed (at least for many decades) to establish black rights. Alternatively, it may simply take a willingness to probe more deeply the issues of abolitionist success and failure. It might take more optimism, in our time, concerning the prospects of progressive reform in regard to such issues as world peace, global warming, distribution of wealth, and human trafficking.
It is not difficult to establish that abolitionists (fanatics or not) had an important role in bringing on the Civil War and helped shape Union emancipatory policies during the war. Historians in the early decades of the twenty-first century appear more willing than the neoabolitionists to recognize that violence, as well as nonviolence, can contribute to social progress. At least one recent study suggests that the North pulled its troops out of the defeated South too soon and thereby sold out black rights.49 But, given the interactive relationship between current issues and interpretations of the past, negative evaluations of recent American military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria may lead historians once again to question abolitionist support for military emancipation during the Civil War.
Similarly, more research into how reform movements contribute to incremental progress might influence how historians portray the abolitionist impact. As is often observed, Congress did not repeal the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which the abolitionists helped bring about. While the Supreme Court for decades misinterpreted these amendments, they nevertheless remained in place, allowing NAACP lawyers and sympathetic federal judges to return them to their original meaning during a period stretching from the late 1930s into the 1960s. The civil rights movement led to an improved racial climate, a growing number of elected black officials, and the election of a black U.S. president in 2008. These developments have influenced studies stressing a positive relationship between black and white abolitionists. Yet even more recent developments may cause another shift in how historians portray the abolitionists’ long-term success or failure. These developments include new state-level restrictions that disproportionately threaten black voting rights and multiple examples of racial prejudice among white police officers.
1.Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 213. Daniel Walker Howe places these themes in a wider American context. See Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1851–1848 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).
2.The Liberator (newspaper, Boston), Dec. 14, 1833; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (1973; reprint, Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1995), 55–91.
3.Stanley Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South, 1831–1861 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1995), 64–83; Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2003), 64–93.
4.Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 5 vols. (New York: International, 1972), 1:398–99; Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2004), 123–39; [Gerrit Smith], “A Letter to the American Slaves from Those Who Have Fled from American Slavery,” in Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism, 189–96, quote, 192; Angelina Grimké Weld, qtd. in Gerald Sorin, Abolitionism: A New Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1972), 95; Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York: Century, 1885–1889), 3:440.
5.Henry C. Wright to William Lloyd Garrison, Jan. 8, 1857, in Liberator, Jan. 23, 1857; Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 235; Franklin B. Sanborn, ed., The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia (1885; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 131 (3rd quotation).
6.James Oakes argues that Lincoln’s and other Republicans’ commitment to denationalize slavery by barring it from the territories, ending it in Washington, D.C., and ending the interstate slave trade amounted to a commitment to end slavery in the Southern states. Abolitionists doubted this conclusion. They believed they had to continuously prod Republicans toward immediatism. See Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 2013), esp. 1–48.
7.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (New York: Verso, 1998); James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1964; 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), 31–37; Douglass’ Monthly (magazine, Rochester) 3 (Jan. 1861): 388.
8.Henry B. Stanton to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Apr. [n.d.], 1861, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter, LC); Oliver Johnson to J. M. McKim, Apr. 18, 1861, McKim Papers, Cornell University, as quoted in McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 48; William Lloyd Garrison to Johnson, Apr. 19, 1861, in Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames, eds., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979), 5:17.
9.Douglass’ Monthly 4 (Aug. 1861): 497–98; Advocate of Peace, July–Aug. 1861, May–June 1863, quoted in Carleton Mabee, Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 through the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 340.
10.Sarah Grimké to [William Lloyd Garrison], Nov. 30, 1863, in Proceedings of the American Anti-Slavery Society, at Its Third Decade, held in the City of Philadelphia, Dec. 3d and 4th, 186[3] (New York: AASS, 1864), 145; Theodore Weld to Martha Coffin Wright, Mar. 23, 1862 (copy), Garrison Family Papers, Smith Collection, Smith College Library, qtd. in David Hempton, Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2008), 85.
11.Elizure Wright to Salmon P. Chase, May 4, 1861, Chase Papers, LC, qtd. in McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 61; Douglass’ Monthly 4 (June 1861): 465–66; Liberator, July 12, 1861.
12.Mabee, Black Freedom, 337–38; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 9–38, 40–45, 52–93, 116–30, 133–47, 154–91, 221–59, 353–55.
13.Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 260.
14.AASS, Proceedings of the American Anti-Slavery Society, at Its Third Decade, 3, 29–30; W. P. Garrison and F. J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879, 4:173.
15.Frederick Douglass to Gentlemen, Apr. 3, 1874, in Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1874; Oliver Johnson, William Lloyd Garrison and His Times (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1881), 454; James Freeman Clarke, Anti-Slavery Days: A Sketch of the Struggle which Ended in the Abolition of Slavery in the United States (New York: R. Worthington, 1884), 222.
16.In a historiographical essay, Richard O. Curry suggests that, for a variety of reasons, abolitionists had a role in causing this failure. See Curry, “The Abolitionists and Reconstruction: A Critical Appraisal,” Journal of Southern History 34 (Nov. 1968): 527–45.
17.National Anti-Slavery Standard, Nov. 23, 1861 (1st quotation); Lydia Maria Child to Gerrit Smith, Jan. 7, 1862, qtd. in Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 260 (2nd quotation).
18.AASS, Proceedings of the American Anti-Slavery Society, at Its Third Decade, 58, 71, 111–15.
19.Liberator, June 2, 1865; Henry C. Wright to Francis and Louisa Hinckley, Nov. 1, 1865, in Liberator, Dec. 15, 1865; National Anti-Slavery Standard (newspaper, New York and Philadelphia), Nov. 13, 1869; Julie Roy Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008), 13; Mabee, Black Freedom, 424.
20.Samuel Joseph May, Some Recollections of Our AntiSlavery Conflict (1869; reprint, Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 2008), 396; William Lloyd Garrison to Henry Wilson, June 5, 1874, in Merrill and Ruchames, eds., Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 6:328–29; Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1876; The Independent (magazine), July 6, 1876.
21.Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1884; reprint, Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004), 588–89; Cassius Marcellus Clay, The Life of Cassius Marcellus Clay: Memoirs, Writings, and Speeches, 2 vols. (Cincinnati, Ohio: J. F. Brennan, 1886), 1:596.
22.David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2001), esp. 357–59; Thomas J. Pressley, Americans Interpret Their Civil War, paperback ed. (New York: Free Press, 1962), 176–77; Hugh Tulloch, The Debate on the American Civil War Era (New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999), 209–13.
23.James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, 9 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1892–1928), 1: 62–63; Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition (1906; reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1968); James G. Randall, The Civil War and Reconstruction (Boston, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1937), 146; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, xi; Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (1933; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), 197; Dwight L. Dumond, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (1939; reprint, Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1959), 107.
24. Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 197; Dumond, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War, 107.
25.Avery O. Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942), 124–31, 150.
26.Avery O. Craven, “The South in American History,” Historical Outlook 21 (Mar. 1930): 106; Frank L. Owsley, “The Fundamental Cause of the Civil War: Egocentric Sectionalism,” Journal of Southern History 7 (Feb. 1941): 16–18; Randall, Civil War and Reconstruction, 146.
27.Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956), 141 (quotation); Howard Zinn, “Abolitionists, Freedom Riders, and the Tactics of Agitation,” in The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997), 115–43.
28.Don E. Fehrenbacher, review of Tilden G. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, in American Historical Review 75 (Oct. 1969): 212; Tulloch, Debate on the American Civil War Era, 90–91; Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, 2nd ed. (Boston, Mass.: Beach, 1965), iv, 14.
29.Merton L. Dillon, “The Failure of American Abolitionists,” Journal of Southern History 25 (May 1959): 173–76. See also Hugh Davis, “The Failure of Political Abolitionism,” Connecticut Review 6 (Apr. 1973): 76–86.
30.McPherson, Struggle for Equality, v, ix.
31.Ibid., xiii–xiv.
32.Ibid., 430–32.
33.Mabee, Black Freedom, 333–34, 337–39, 345–67, 370; James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 186.
34.Merton L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (New York: Norton, 1974), 251–52, 257–63; Stewart, Holy Warriors, 185, 194–99.
35.Mabee, Black Freedom, 334–35, 371–74; Dillon, Abolitionists, 264–65; Stewart, Holy Warriors, 202.
36.United States, Kerner Commission, Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorder (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1968), 1.
37.Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).
38.Mabee, Black Freedom, 374, 379.
39.Dillon, Abolitionists, 226, 274–75; Stewart, Holy Warriors, 203.
40.Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 1:667, 698–99, 710, 2:51–53; Tolloch, Debate on the American Civil War, 90–94; Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 236.
41.Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Antislavery Ambivalence: Immediatism, Expediency, Race,” American Quarterly 17 (Winter 1965): 682–94; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830–1861 (New York: Athenaeum, 1974), 68–94; Merton L. Dillon, “The Abolitionists: A Decade of Historiography, 1959–1969,” Journal of Southern History 35 (Nov. 1969): 500–22; Eric Foner, “The Causes of the Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions,” Civil War History 20 (Sept. 1976): 198; Lawrence J. Friedman, “‘Historical Topics Sometimes Run Dry’: The State of Abolitionist Studies,” Historian 43 (Feb. 1981): 177–94; Walters, Antislavery Appeal, 70–78; James Brewer Stewart, “Young Turks and Old Turkeys: Abolitionists, Historians, and the Aging Process, “Reviews in American History (June 1983): 226–37; James L. Huston, “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse,” Journal of Southern History 56 (Nov. 1990): 609–20.
42.Martin Duberman, “The Northern Response to Slavery,” in Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), 395; Larry Gara, “Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction,” Civil War History 15 (Mar. 1969): 18.
43.McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 3; David Brion Davis, “The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (Sept. 1962): 229; David Brion Davis, “Antislavery or Abolition?” Reviews in American History 1 (Mar. 1973): 95–99; Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics 1848–54 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1973), 2; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Ends, Means, and Attitudes: Black-White Conflict in the Antislavery Movement,” Civil War History 18 (June 1972): 117–28; Blanche Glassman Hersh, “‘Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?’ Abolilitionist Beginnings of Nineteenth-Century Feminism,” in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979), 239–52; Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: Abolitionists after 1830 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), xiii, 60–61, 70–87, 95, 111–28; Lawrence J. Friedman, “‘Pious Fellowship’ and Modernity: A Psychological Interpretation,” in Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System, ed. Alan M. Kraut (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood, 1983), 160–95; Nancy Hewett, “The Social Origins of Women’s Anti-Slavery Politics in Western New York,” in Kraut, Crusaders and Compromisers, 205–34.
44.Donald M. Scott, “Abolitionism as a Sacred Vocation,” in Perry and Fellman, Anti-slavery Reconsidered, 72; Friedman, “‘Historical Topics Sometimes Run Dry,’” 194.
45.Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998); John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002).
46.Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds., Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New York: New Press, 2006), 42; Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002).
47.Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976); Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004); Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005); Edward B. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2008); James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: Norton, 2007); Oakes, Freedom National. In addition to Oakes’s dual biography of Douglass and Lincoln, among other books that extend studies of abolitionism into the Civil War years are: Friedman, Gregarious Saints; John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984); Herbert Aptheker, Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1989); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998). To various degrees these books question abolitionist impact.
48. Wendy Hamond Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1991), 20–35, 38–56, 64–93, 123–49); W. Caleb McDaniel, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Democracy: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2013); Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010), 24–29, 180–81, 189–90; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969); R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1983); Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study of Activism (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1992).
49.Gregory F. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the End of the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2015).