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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 664-666



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The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. By Richard S. Newman (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002) 256pp. $45.00 cloth $18.95 paper

The historiography of American abolitionism seems to have entered a new interpretive phase in its ongoing dialectic. Scholars of the 1940s and 1950s, troubled by the implications of ideological intransigence in their own time, saw Garrisonian abolitionists as fanatics who went too far and brought about an unnecessary war. Scholars of the early 1960s, many of whom were actively involved in the Civil Rights movement, saw themselves in the abolitionists and the abolitionists in themselves, reinterpreting abolitionism as a righteous and necessary war fought to egalitarian ends. Scholars of the 1970s, especially black scholars, disgusted that the Civil Rights movement had ended legal segregation without ending racism, were critical of the abolitionists, not because they had gone too far but because they had not gone far enough. The new wave of scholarship argues that the abolitionists were egalitarian after all—perhaps not coincidentally in a moment when a neoconservative attack on affirmative efforts seems to demand defensive measures. Paul Goodman's recent Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley, 1998) is exemplary of this interpretation; Newman's book makes this same argument.

Newman's project is to reconnect pre- and post-Revolutionary abolitionism by tracing the shifts in strategy, tactics, leadership, and rank-and-file membership that led from the gradualism of the immediate post-Revolutionary period to the immediatism of the 1830s. Among other questions, Newman seeks to explain why the second-wave movement so completely eclipsed the first in American memory that Americans would "ever remember the aggressive post-1830s movement as the essence of organized antislavery" (2). [End Page 664]

Newman identifies and traces a number of transformations in roughly seventy-five years of abolitionism: from the restricted participation of elites to recruitment of "the masses"; from a war waged in the courts to one waged in the popular press and on the lecture circuit; from a Pennsylvania-based movement to one centered in Boston; and from a whites-only movement to one that not only employed black lecturers and "witnesses" but admitted blacks to leadership roles.

Newman frames his study as a tale of two institutions—the Pennsylvania Abolition Society ( PAS ), founded in Philadelphia in 1775, and the Massachusetts Antislavery Society (the model for the American Antislavery Society), founded in 1832 in Boston. With its roots in Quaker opposition to slavery, PAS was dominated by wealthy and socially prominent white businessmen, political leaders, and lawyers who nominated each other and paid dues. Committed to republican values and deferential processes, the PAS used rationalistic, "dispassionate" measures to fight slavery—legislative action, petitioning, and court challenges. Their efforts spawned gradualist movements in other northern states and produced post nati abolition laws and constitutional challenges that eventually eliminated slavery from the states north of Pennsylvania.

Although blacks were unwelcome as members, their freedom cases provided the substance of the PAS attack on slavery. Newman describes those legal battles in detail. Individual black activism was the catalyst for PAS efforts, Newman argues; PAS legal work "illustrates the many links between black activism and white abolitionism" (72).

An equally strong tradition of institutional black activism inspired the emergence of immediatism in the 1820s and converted Garrison from a colonizationist to an immediatist. From establishing self-help organizations to staging marches and other public events, from sermonizing to PAS -style petitioning and pamphleteering, African-Americans had aggressively attacked slavery and sought civil rights in the public arena for decades before Garrison came on the scene, without attracting much support from whites. But when they attacked the American Colonization Society ( ACS) and the crude anti-black stereotypes that colonizationists commonly employed in their crusade to remove free blacks from the United States, black activism captured the attention of white antislavery activists and brought racial prejudice and civil rights for free blacks onto whites' antislavery agenda...

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