ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION: THE RADICAL TRADITION OF ABOLITION

The conflict over the contours and nature of American democracy has often centered on debates over black freedom and rights. The origins of that momentous and ongoing political struggle lie in the movement to abolish slavery. This book tells the story of abolition. It is a comprehensive new history of the abolition movement that extends its chronological parameters from the classical pre–Civil War period back to the American Revolution and rejects conventional divisions between slave resistance and antislavery activism. A history of abolition in the longue durée, it centers African Americans in it. Abolition was a radical, interracial movement, one which addressed the entrenched problems of exploitation and disfranchisement in a liberal democracy and anticipated debates over race, labor, and empire.

Caricatured as unthinking, single-minded fanatics who caused a “needless war,” abolitionists are often compared unfavorably to political moderates and compromise-minded statesmen. Their resurrection as freedom fighters during the modern civil rights era has been relatively brief. It is often dismissed as neoabolitionist history. While a bland celebration of the abolitionist movement with its radical edges shorn off inhabits popular culture, the dominant picture of abolitionists in American history is that of bourgeois reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism.¹ Neither the scholarly nor the lay consensus on abolition does justice to the movement’s rich, diverse, and contentious history.

Slave resistance, not bourgeois liberalism, lay at the heart of the abolition movement.² Slave rebellions paralleled isolated criticisms of slavery in colonial America. The enslaved inspired the formation of the first Quaker-dominated abolition and manumission societies as well as the first landmark cases that inaugurated emancipation in the Western world. The actions of slave rebels and runaways, black writers and community leaders, did not lie outside of but shaped abolition and its goals. As most abolitionists understood, the story of abolition must begin with the struggles of the enslaved. The connection between slave resistance and abolition in the United States was proximate and continuous. Prominent slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition. Fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery. Recent historians have declared black resistance to enslavement passé, but it was central to abolition. Not restricted to wartime emancipation, the American abolitionist moment unfolded in a hundred-year drama in law, politics, literature, and on-the-ground activism. To reduce emancipation to an event precipitated by military crisis is to miss that long history.

The history of abolition is an integrated story even though it is usually not told in that manner. Black abolitionists were integral to the broader, interracial milieu of the movement. To read them out of the abolition movement is to profoundly miss the part they played in defining traditions of American democratic radicalism. The insidious divide between white thought and black activism that pervades some books on abolition is both racialist and inaccurate. There was no such racial division of political labor in the abolition movement. Early African American literature, black abolitionists’ intellectual response to the pseudo science of race, and debates over citizenship and emigration performed the work of political protest. The theoretical sophistication of black abolitionist thought should finally put to rest the influential yet glib view of it as imitative, mired in the strictures of middle-class reform and elitism, and divorced from the plight of southern slaves and northern masses. Black and white abolitionists also went beyond a simple appeal to the American republican tradition that sought to include African Americans in its promise. They generated a powerful critique of the slaveholding Republic and constructed a counternarrative that highlighted its origins in the slave trade and slavery.³

The alternative nature of abolitionism is showcased by its diverse membership, which gave rise to cooperation as well as to creative conflict across rigid lines of race, class, and gender that characterized early American society. The abolition movement, in which the disfranchised, including women, played a seminal role, was driven by passionate outsiders. Women were abolition’s foot soldiers and, more controversially, its leaders and orators. In birthing the first women’s rights movement, abolition again revealed its radical face. The abolition movement married the black struggle against slavery to progressive white evangelicalism and to the iconoclasm of more secular reformers. Its steady radicalization on women’s rights, organized religion, politics, and direct action made it quickly outgrow the empire of religious benevolence and moral reform.⁴

Abolition was a radical, democratic movement that questioned the enslavement of labor. The best works on abolition have tried to understand it by overturning simplistic social control models that emphasized social and ideological conformity to legitimize an emerging capitalist economy. Scholars have long known that modern racial slavery fostered the growth of early capitalism. If slavery is capitalism, as the currently fashionable historical interpretation has it, the movement to abolish it is, at the very least, its obverse. The history of capitalism illustrates that it has rarely marched in lockstep with democracy. The fraught relationship between capitalism and democracy is characterized more by contestation. Modern racial slavery was a monstrous hybrid that combined the horrors of an archaic labor system with the rapacious efficiencies of capitalism.⁵ Like the slave system they opposed, abolitionists were hybrids, old-fashioned moralizers as well as modern exponents of human rights. It is no coincidence that the brief, incomplete triumph of the abolitionist vision resulted in the greatest expansion of American democracy, and that the demise of abolition went hand in hand with the greatest contraction of democracy. At the heart of that movement lay the slave’s struggle for freedom and human dignity.

Never the so-called monomaniacs they were lampooned as, abolitionists recognized that the oppression of slaves was linked to other wrongs in their world. More than a few abolitionists joined such international radical movements as utopian socialism, feminism, and pacifism and championed Native American, immigrant, and workingmen’s rights. Some even anticipated contemporary American scourges, criticizing the criminalization of blackness and the use of capital punishment and force by the state. Abolitionists were the intellectual and political precursors of twentieth-century anticolonial and civil rights activists, debating the nature of society and politics, the relationship between racial inequality and democracy, nation and empire, labor and capital, gender and citizenship. They used the vehicle of antislavery to criticize the democratic pretensions of Western societies and expose their seamier side. Abolitionists were opponents of rather than stalking horses of new forms of servitude and imperialism. As radical agitators, they were not so much theorists of liberal democracy as critics of it. In prioritizing the abolition of slavery, they did not ignore and certainly did not legitimize other forms of oppression in the modern world. Only by conflating the state with the social movement can historians view abolition as the progenitor of European imperialism.⁶

Abolitionists were original and critical thinkers on democracy, not simply romantic reformers who confined themselves to appeals to the heart. The movement against slavery made a signal contribution to the discourse of both human rights and humanitarianism. The depiction of abused black bodies in abolitionist print culture, from slave narratives dripping with blood to abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets, has appeared to many scholars as bourgeois sentimentality, voyeuristic pornography, and racist objectification of the enslaved. This scholarly gaze, the vast condescension bestowed on the very real history of black suffering under the political economy of a harsh slave regimen, leads people astray. It is based on a whitewashed understanding of abolition that reads out the black presence in it completely. Its roots lie in slaveholders’ defensive response to abolitionist criticism, and it fundamentally misreads abolitionist agitation, the attempt to evoke radical empathy from an audience whose very comforts were dependent on the exploitation of those deemed inferior and expendable.⁷ Those lessons remain useful today.

Confronted by a reactionary, expansionist slaveholding class that dreamed of a global empire based on slavery, the real Slave Power rather than a figment of paranoid imagination, abolitionists developed an uncompromising response to its imperialist aggressions at home and abroad. As the movement matured in the teeth of strong slaveholding opposition and state power in the United States, the cause of the American slave became intertwined with that of democracy, civil liberties, and the emancipation of women and labor. Far from being an extremist formulation with no relevance to national politics and the important events of the day, abolitionists’ political project, the overthrow of the slavery-based polity of the nineteenth-century American Republic, was at the vanguard of antislavery. Some abolitionists became disenchanted with their country and government, while others sought to harness the power of the state against slavery. The history of abolition is an ideal test case of how radical social movements generate engines of political change. As they do in all social movements, questions of principle versus expediency permeated abolition, giving rise to divisions over tactics. Abolitionists debated the culpability of the church, state, and society as well as their amenability to change: whether society could be transformed through political action and whether the state was an arena of conflict or a tool of the Slave Power. It is a mistake, however, to equate slaveholders’ political power with modern state formation. For good reason the conservative political tradition of American slaveholders, who dominated the federal and their state governments from inception and used all the repressive powers of the state to further the interests of slavery, was strongly antistatist.⁸

During the Civil War and Reconstruction the enslaved and their radical allies pushed the nation to realize their ideal of an interracial democracy. And for a brief period, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, the slave stood in the sun before being shoved back into the shadows. The overthrow of Reconstruction had little to do with the alleged poverty of the abolitionist vision and a lot to do with the enduring power of abolition’s opponents. When the horror of racial injustice settled in again, not just the formerly enslaved but democracy as a whole suffered. The fate of American democracy lay not in the hands of the powerful, with their dreams of wealth and empire, but in the postwar movements for racial, gender, and economic autonomy.⁹ The abolitionist project of perfecting American, indeed global, democracy remains to be fulfilled. In that sense, its legacy is an enduring one.

A new historical narrative of abolition, this book challenges long-standing interpretive binaries. For too long historians of abolition have told its story in a fragmented fashion and continue to do so along the lines of race and gender. Older historical debates over the relative importance of Garrisonians versus the evangelicals and political abolitionists, that is, eastern versus western abolitionists, revisit and rehash abolitionist divisions, at times uncritically adopting the positions of their subjects. I have found them to be far less important than the attention lavished on them suggests and highly conducive to the perpetuation of stereotypes that defy the historical record.

Recent syntheses on abolition provide global histories of slavery and emancipation in the modern West.¹⁰ By contrast, my book narrates a movement history of abolition in the United States in a transnational context. It stresses continuity rather than rupture in the abolitionist tradition, which from its inception was an interracial one and tied to the development of democracy. From the early Quaker and black protests against slavery to the rise of the Anglo-American movement against the slave trade in the late eighteenth century to the golden age of abolitionism in the years before the Civil War, abolitionists were united by their devotion to the slave’s cause. Even after bitter divisions sundered the movement, nothing brought all abolitionists together more readily than the fugitive slave’s desperate bid for freedom. The title of the book comes from the words of abolitionists, who commonly used the phrase to describe their movement, signing their letters, “Yours for the slave.”

It has taken me many years of archival research and reading of the enormous historical scholarship on abolition to do justice to this topic. Abolitionists were not just quintessential agitators but also wordsmiths. Whatever they lacked in power, they made up for by outproducing their mighty opponents in newspapers, books, pamphlets, letters, diaries, memoirs, material, and artwork, creating a huge, complicated historical archive. Any history of abolition must begin with that archive, as it opens a window into their worldview. In narrating a history of abolition, I engage the ideas and actions of men and women, black and white, who proved to be a match for the New World’s slaveholding ancien régime. They were the disfranchised themselves and the allies of the disfranchised. They understood that the slave’s cause never dies.