The Antislavery Wars of Southern Blacks and Enslaved Rebels: Shifting the Historiography into the South

SUMMER 2014 3 The Antislavery Wars of Southern Blacks and Enslaved Rebels Shifting the Historiography into the South Douglas R. Egerton A s late as the early 1980s, scholars of the abolitionist movement tended to focus on two areas of the early republic, and to squabble about which was the more important of the two: the broad Burned Over District that stretched from Boston to Buffalo, and the Ohio world of the Lane rebels. At least when it comes to popular culture, regrettably, not a great deal has changed. As 2013’s multi-part PBS series The Abolitionists indicates, militant antislavery evidently sprang to life in 1831 when William Lloyd Garrison began to publish The Liberator. As marvelous and insightful as were on-camera commentators David Blight, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Manisha Sinha, and James Brewer Stewart, they ultimately could not counteract the producers’ vision of the movement as largely white, largely northeastern, and one that effectively existed only for the last three decades of the antebellum era. As Richard S. Newman perceptively observed in a critical review of the series, the documentary “could have been told several decades ago and in an historiographical universe far away,” as its intense focus on a small band of New England reformers was “not very different from 1960s depictions of abolitionists.”1 Like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, in which abolitionists were largely absent and black Americans existed to observe passively congressional debates from the balcony, the PBS series hinted that African Americans generally served the antislavery movement by singing at white weddings. Richard Allen, David Ruggles, and David Walker failed to earn even brief cameos. Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). THE ANTISLAVERY WARS OF SOUTHERN BLACKS AND ENSLAVED REBELS 4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY The scholarly world, as specialists in the field well know, has largely moved on, and it had begun to do so well before I waded into this historiography in graduate school. As early as 1961 and 1966, Merton L. Dillon’s biographies of Elijah P. Lovejoy and Benjamin Lundy examined the saga of antislavery reform in the Lower North and Upper South, as did Stewart’s 1973 article, “Evangelicalism and the Radical Strain in Southern Antislavery Thought.” More recently, historians like Newman, Graham Russell Hodges, and Gary Nash—writers more interested in black activism than in white evangelical reform movements—have turned their attention to New York and Philadelphia, just as they have shoved the story back into the years following the American Revolution. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Carol Lasser, and Stacey Robertson have wonderfully chronicled the great grassroots army of women who fought and organized to end slavery.2 Stanley Harrold’s prodigious, influential, and revisionist body of work draws the story farther south yet, into Washington City and the contested borderlands stretching from Maryland in the East to Kansas in the West. From 1986’s Gamaliel Bailey and Antislavery Union through The Abolitionists and the South, the co-edited anthology Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, 2001’s American Abolitionists, followed by Subversives: Antislavery Community inWashington, and then The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves, and most especially, the award-winning Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War, perhaps no single historian has done as much to upset the old narrative, confound the old debate, and re-conceptualize the antislavery movement. Such paradigm shifts, of course, do not come without detractors, so allow me to illuminate Harrold’s greatest achievements and suggest what remains to be done.3 To an extent, Border War is not the first study to portray the Lower North and Upper South as a region long caught up in cross-border conflict, and of course even the most innovative scholarship rests on the shoulders of historians who came before. William W. Freehling, as Harrold observes, not only has thoroughly studied the Border South in the years leading up to secession and war, he essentially pioneered the concept of a multi-sectional South. Yet Freehling emphasizes moderates in the region and underlines peaceful resolution of sectional issues, whereas Harrold highlights “violent and often external threat...