Paths Not Taken in North American Abolitionism

Standards in modern scholarship on North American abolitionism derive from the 1960s, when, under the influence of the civil rights movement and controversy over the Vietnam War, a number of scholars focused on the years from 1830 to 1865. In these years, abolitionism gained a national organization, a voice in northern politics, an opposition in proslavery thought, and a collection of spokespeople, luminaries, and martyrs. The trajectory from the inception of the American Anti-Slavery Society to the federal victory in the Civil War allowed scholars an ample field in which to work but also limited the boundaries of their writings. The urgency of outlawing slavery set limits so firmly that only a few writers—for example, John L. Thomas, Deborah McDowell, Joanne Melish, Saidiya Hartman—took on what we might consider the underside of abolitionism: its lack of a coherent social vision, its masculinization of discourse, its complicity in postwar racism, and its scopophilia in regards to the black body. Nothing here is intended to discredit abolitionism or its scholars but only to point out that as part of nineteenth-century American thought and practice it inevitably participated in larger ideological and social systems that differ in part from those of our own time. Both the similarities and the differences have sparked outstanding scholarly writing and classroom teaching. More recently, in the last twenty years, it has become apparent that scholars examining abolitionism from 1770 to 1829 are unrestrained by that antebellum trajectory simply because early North American abolitionists, not yet grasping the means by which slavery in the United States would eventually end, cast in different directions even as they laid the foundation for their antebellum successors. What some have considered to be the impracticability of eighteenth-century abolitionism might be better regarded as its creativity. Working outside the dynamo of antebellum abolitionism has had several consequences for scholars whose work has appeared in the last two decades.

First, a new definition of abolitionism has arisen from their writings—an opposition to the slave trade and slavery that required less a social organization than a determination that slavery was wrong in all times and all places and for all people, not merely, as had been long thought, for exceptional individuals. Earlier critics had criticized the enslavement of some individuals, but never forthrightly declared the institution of slavery itself to be immoral. For Christians the apparent legitimacy of slavery as described in the Old Testament was a bar to abolitionism, so that the only lever available, as in Morgan Godwyn’s and Jonathan Edwards’s writings, was the treatment of slaves. But in the later eighteenth century a typological interpretation of the Bible came to emphasize that the Israelites’ ability to hold slaves was based on a misunderstanding of God’s word that was resolved only later by Gentiles when they realized that the Old Testament (as a “hidden” Gospel) could be understood only with the New Testament in hand and that the revealed word on slavery was symbolic, not literal. Typology (here clearly anti-Semitic) allowed Christians to become abolitionist insofar as they understood that all biblically based defenses of slavery relied on a misunderstanding of God’s word. Thus scholars are correct in identifying abolitionism in mid-to late-eighteenth-century thought even in the absence of a social organization dedicated to extirpating slavery. Second, new possibilities have opened up: the black Atlantic understood as a system of people and exchanges linking indigenous, colonial, and national cultures; the foundations of antebellum abolitionism as they were...