Abolition in the Age of Obama

What is abolitionism? Abolitionism, today, might allude to everything from “the prison industrial complex” to “climate change.” Despite the different domains in which the term is deployed, of course it still refers explicitly to the historical struggle against slavery. Writing in the late 1960s, at the peak of the civil rights movement, about the context for the “freedom struggle” of his time, Benjamin Quarles called abolitionism “the most important and revolutionary reform in our country’s past” (vii). More recent accounts of the movement have helped to expand the history of abolitionism. According to Richard S. Newman, “Abolitionism was born with the American republic” and “did not fade until the nation’s near-death experience of the Civil War” (2). While historians disagree over when (and where) abolitionism began, they generally agree about its end—Emancipation—and typically focus on these 89 years from the Revolution to the Civil War. If that history has expanded, most significantly through the work of historian David Brion Davis, its objective has remained constant: to understand how slavery was brought to an end. Abolitionism’s move beyond history into an ongoing and ever-changing discourse has raised its profile, Andrew Delbanco suggests, not just among Americanists but Americans. “If we construe abolition in this wider sense … what might it tell us about our country?” (3). For Delbanco, abolitionism is a state of mind. Abolitionism is a state of mind, synonymous with being American, a belief in the rightness of a cause no matter the cost. Not all of us (Americans and Americanists) subscribe to such a political program, but we inevitably admire those who do.

Still, the association between abolitionism and the end of slavery is what gives the movement such a good rap. Rather than ask, “Who were the Abolitionists?” as Delbanco does at the outset of his book, The Abolitionist Imagination (2012), it might make more sense to ask, “Who isn’t an abolitionist?” In other words, we are all, at least in our opposition to slavery, abolitionists today. To be an abolitionist is to be on the right side of history. Not to be an abolitionist is to be flat out wrong. Paradoxically, recent accounts of US literature deploy this spirit of abolitionism—its historical association with the truth—with considerable effect. Reading abolitionism through the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Frederick Douglass in particular, reveals a new history of the movement in which the founding principles of the nation—justice, freedom, and democracy—are radically transformed. While it may come as a bit of a surprise that a moderate like Melville and a conservative like Hawthorne would find much in common with more ardent abolitionists like Thoreau and Douglass, we quickly realize that these differences are less important than we might think. By eschewing them, these works present us with new, though not unfamiliar American heroes, namely, Douglass and John Brown, men who fought against slavery rather than simply for freedom.

Delbanco’s essay, and the four individual responses published alongside it that constitute The Abolitionist Imagination, is at once a nuanced and sweeping account of the movement and its consequences upon American life today. Nick Bromell’s The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of US Democracy (2013) reconstitutes what is conventionally called “African-American literature” as “US public philosophy” by bringing together political theory with literary and cultural studies. As his title suggests, Bromell’s interest in African-American literature lies in its ability to “speak powerfully today to all Americans” (80). The power of literature to speak, rather than be merely read, is also central to Caleb Smith’s The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the...