An Illuminating but Not Entirely Novel Window on Abolitionism

Although it seems strange to say this about a book running nearly 600 pages of text, this volume offers a narrow window on the abolitionist movement that both illuminates and obscures. Sinha’s narrative focuses tightly on the abolitionists themselves, with only occasional references to the larger context in which they operated. Another reason for its tight focus is that this is a highly thesis-driven book. These aspects contribute to both this ambitious book’s weaknesses and its considerable strengths.

Sinha’s theses are clear and persuasive. The central argument is the importance of black activists—construed broadly to encompass everyone from slave rebels to free people of color seeking to defend their rights—to the making of the abolitionist movement. One running corollary of this argument is that “slave resistance, not bourgeois liberalism, lay at the heart of the abolition movement” (p. 1). Another major thesis is that extending abolition’s “chronological parameters” beyond “the classical pre–Civil War period” (p. 1) and seeing the connections between American and British abolitionists both help us view eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American abolitionism as one story “marked as much by continuity as by disjuncture” (p. 191).

While the clarity of these arguments is valuable, the degree to which they drive the book excludes other themes that are key to a truly comprehensive view of abolitionism. Politics is the most glaring theme to which the book does not devote full attention. In the early chapters, abolitionists’ arguments largely float above or otherwise outside events such as the imperial crisis leading to the American Revolution or those leading to the Missouri Crisis. The vital political context in which those abolitionists wrote and spoke and acted is thus absent. Interestingly, in Sinha’s account, black activists from Phyllis Wheatley forward appear to have had much more political acumen than their white counterparts. But even for them, and even in separate passages devoted directly to abolitionists’ politics, this book’s analysis of abolitionist political engagement rarely digs deeper than the simplest level of rhetoric. (Excellent discussions of the Free Soil Party and the relationship between abolitionists and the Republican Party are exceptions to this pattern.) The later chapters comprising part two are thematic rather than chronological, an eminently defensible approach. But one downside to this is that it treats the antebellum period as one unit, thereby obscuring the enormous shifts that occurred during this era, even at the level of party systems. Part two also unduly downplays the serious tensions between antislavery politicians such as John Quincy Adams and abolitionists, tensions that derived in large part from the instability of party politics combined with these politicians’ deep party loyalties. Taken as a whole, this volume gives an inadequate sense of the complex and dynamic political and partisan conditions in which abolitionists acted.

Sinha also at times over-argues her case. In a few passages she seems to overstate the influence of African Americans on some white actors. More often, though, the book features a take-no-prisoners defense of the abolitionists, a sort of defense of their honor that has them always in the right on every issue. Abolitionists, she insists, were far more united than it appeared from the outside, they supported the Haitian Revolution from its outset, and they offered critiques of—rather than justifications for—capitalism and Western imperialism. Sinha even resists minor criticisms of abolitionist heroes such as the military futility of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.

Such bold strokes in introductory passages are at times at odds with more nuanced treatments in the work’s deep tracks. There, Sinha pays full attention to divisions within the abolitionist ranks, and at times evinces a willingness to grant that some early national abolitionists were racially exclusionary, some Virginia abolitionists distanced themselves from the Haitian Revolution, some abolitionists leveraged as well as criticized American nationalism. Some few British abolitionists, such as Thomas Fowell Buxton...