MOST historians have paid little attention to the abolitionist movement after 1860. Yet it was in the 1860’s that the abolitionist crusade reached the height of its power and saw the achievement of most of its objectives. After the outbreak of the Civil War, abolitionists were transformed almost overnight from despised fanatics to influential and respected spokesmen for the radical wing of the Republican party. Early in the war, abolitionists outlined a broad program of emancipation, employment of Negro soldiers in the Union Army, creation of a Freedmen’s Bureau, government assistance for the education of the freedmen, civil and political equality for all black men, and grants of confiscated land to the freed slaves. Under the military pressures of war and the political pressures of reconstruction, the Republican party adopted all of these policies except the wholesale confiscation of southern plantations. True, the North retreated from radicalism after 1870 and failed to enforce the provisions of Reconstruction after 1877, but the equalitarian achievements of the Civil War and Reconstruction remained in the Constitution and the statute books, where they constitute today the legal basis for the “Second Reconstruction” of the South.
Despite the prominence of abolitionists during the war and reconstruction years, standard historical treatments of the antislavery movement virtually ignore the period after 1860. The implicit assumption is that abolitionism merged itself with the Republican party during the war and therefore no longer possessed a separate identity or purpose. Garrison’s willingness to cease publication of his Liberator and to dissolve the antislavery societies in 1865 is deemed proof that abolitionists considered the Thirteenth Amendment the consummation of their crusade and were little concerned with the Negro after emancipation. Nothing could be more misleading. It is true that for the first time in their lives, abolitionists marched in step with a major political party after 1861. But they marched far in advance of the Republican party, and frequently the party refused to follow them as fast as they desired. At such times they would chastise the Republicans with old-time vigor and abandon. Throughout the 1860’s most abolitionists preserved their separate identity, and cooperated with the Republican party only when that party was marching in the direction they wanted to go. Abolitionists showed a greater concern for the plight of the Negro after 1865 than anyone else except the Negro himself. The American Anti-Slavery Society and its auxiliaries remained in existence after the war to wage battle for the full civil and political equality of the Negro. Even Garrison, despite his withdrawal from the antislavery societies in 1865, did not consider his crusade ended when the slave was freed. Along with many other abolitionists, he was active in the movement to educate the freedmen, and his denunciations of racial discrimination were no less militant after 1865 than before.
This book is an effort to trace the history of the abolitionist movement during the Civil War and Reconstructon, to evaluate the contribution of abolitionists to the efforts to solve the race problem in those years, and to view America’s greatest social and political revolution through the eyes of the nation’s foremost equalitarians. No claim will be made that the abolitionists were primarily responsible for the gains of the Negro in the war and reconstruction. Abolitionists did not forge or control events; but neither was their influence negligible. In many respects the abolitionists served as the conscience of the radical Republicans. They provided an idealistic-moral-humanitarian justification for the policies of the Republican party—policies which were undertaken primarily for military or political reasons. The ideas, activities, and responses of abolitionists during a period when their movement reached its climax are not without historical interest.
I am indebted to the following library staffs: the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts; the Boston Public Library; the Columbia University Library; the Concord Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts; the Cornell University Library; the Frederick Douglass Memorial Home, Anacostia Heights, Washington, D.C.; the Essex Institute Library, Salem, Massachusetts; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Johns Hopkins University Library, especially the interlibrary loan division; the Library of Congress; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the New York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City; the Radcliffe Women’s Archives, Radcliffe College; the Rochester University Library; the Smith College Library; the Syracuse University Library; the Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier, Vermont; the Wayland Historical Society, Wayland, Massachusetts; and the Worcester Historical Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. They were very kind and I wish to thank them for assistance in locating materials and for permission to quote from manuscripts in their possession.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor C. Vann Woodward, whose advice and counsel proved valuable at every stage of this work. I wish also to thank Professor David Donald, Professor Martin Duberman, and Mrs. Willie Rose, all of whom read the entire manuscript and made helpful suggestions. The encouragement and assistance of my wife, Patricia McPherson, has been inestimable from the first conception of this project to its final completion.
James M. McPherson
Department of History
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey