Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War

Preface

ix  Preface Before the Civil War, slaveholders made themselves into the most powerful , most deeply rooted, and best organized private interest group within the United States. There should be no surprise in this. Investment in slavery, in all of its financial manifestations, was exceeded only by investment in real estate. The U.S. Constitution was studded with guarantees of slavery’s perpetuation. Proslavery presidents, senators, and congressional representatives consistently put forward slavery’s interests. The vast majority of white Americans, Northern and Southern alike, accepted the institution of slavery, believing strongly that “inferior” African Americans were fitted perfectly to their bondage. As most saw it, the very foundation of white Americans’ liberty depended on the ongoing subjugation of the nation’s blacks, the nominally free as well as the enslaved. This volume seeks to evaluate the extent to which a small group of radical activists, the abolitionist movement, played pivotal roles in turning American politics against this formidable system. To pose the problem another way, it examines what influence the abolitionist movement might have had in creating the unfolding political crises that led to civil war. Or, to restate the matter in most general terms, it attempts to assess the extent to which a small number of deeply committed reformers made a truly important difference when demanding that their nation face up to its most excruciating moral problem. These are all challenging subjects, not easily addressed either individually or all at once. Such is particularly true for a book like this one, designed as it is not only for specialists but also for undergraduates and graduate students. For these reasons, the essays presented here respond to these challenging subjects by examining several much more accessible and specific questions about who the abolitionists were and what their work involved. These questions are: What were the abolitionists actually up against
x  PREFACE when seeking to overthrow slavery and white supremacy? What motivated and sustained them during their long and difficult struggles? What larger historical contexts (religious, social, economic, cultural, and political) influenced their choices and determined their behavior? What roles did extraordinary leaders play in shaping the movement? What were the contributions of abolitionism’s unheralded “foot-soldiers”? What political agency did this handful of activists finally exercise on the nation’s governing systems, that is, on its elections, on debates in Congress, on state and local politics, and on political culture? What factors ultimately determined, for better or worse, the abolitionists’ impact on American politics and the realization of their equalitarian goals? Each of these questions is a historical perennial. Generations of scholars have wrestled with all of them. What makes this volume distinctive, I hope, is that it brings them all into a common focus to explain in a comprehensive way why the abolitionists’ crusade truly mattered. Hence, this is, above all, a book about meanings. It offers a series of flesh and blood insights into what the movement meant to its leaders, supporters, and most vocal opponents; what it meant to the powerful men who governed the nation and led its political parties; what it meant to the great mass of voters, those (almost entirely white) men whose ballots determined the fates of those politicians; what it meant to those in the North, free African Americans, Native Americans, and women in particular, who found themselves excluded from formal politics; what, in short, the abolitionist movement meant to the deeply and multiply conflicted generation that witnessed the coming of the Civil War. To promise “flesh and blood insights” is to promise a great deal. In my opinion, satisfying this promise requires seeing deeply into individuals’ lives and into relationships between those lives and the changing politics of the nation. For this reason, this volume emphasizes biography. Readers will quickly notice this feature as they read along, and I hope that it magnifies the book’s focus, accessibility, and interest. Certain key figures, specifically Wendell Phillips, Hosea Easton, William Lloyd Garrison, Benjamin Roberts, and Joshua R. Giddings, people whose lives I have come to know particularly well, reappear in multiple contexts, their lives (public and private) juxtaposed against the ongoing struggles of abolitionists and the changing political scene. In this way, the book sustains
xi  PREFACE a human interest element that I hope its readers will find enriching. No less important, this biographical emphasis makes possible my attempt to explain abolitionism in...