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When Harper’s editor George W. Curtis described the 1865 debate within the American Anti-Slavery Society over the question of disbandment , he saw the success of those wishing to continue the Society as “a victory of sentiment” by a group that was out of touch with reality. What Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Samuel J. May, and the new Executive Board of the aas “seemed to forget,” Curtis affirmed, was “that the whole country is now an anti-slavery society.”1 The easy confidence that abolitionists had achieved their goals and that the northern public had embraced them persisted for a few years, at least in the pages of northern monthly magazines, if not in the hearts and minds of all abolitionists. An article originally published in Harper’s Weekly and reprinted in the Living Age in 1867 discussed how the apparent transformation of public opinion had affected the reputation of abolitionists. The recent celebration of Garrison in London prompted the author to observe, “It is not often that we see the general verdict upon a man so wholly reversed in his lifetime.” Once regarded as a fanatic, Garrison now was seen as embodying “moral inspiration” and “heroic persistence,” with an understanding of slavery “in the main entirely correct.” And while no one man could be exclusively responsible for the great events of history, Garrison’s “moral force” had inspired the emancipation of the South’s slaves. That same year, Harper’s Magazine made a similar point. At one time, the northern public had rejected abolitionism as a crazy fringe movement. Now abolitionism ’s significance was so obvious that some “eleventh-hour” converts to the antislavery cause were unwilling “to allow the Anti-slavery men and women of that time the sole honor of the work” and sought some of the credit for emancipation for themselves. Agreeing with the Living Age’s assessment of abolitionists’ influence, the writer thought that it was obvious that “the pioneers” could not have achieved their goals alone. But their role in transforming northern public opinion had been crucial to realizing emancipation.2 The suggestion that Garrison’s analysis of slavery was justified left little room for sympathy for prewar southerners, who defended their peculiar c h a p t e r 1The First Recollections institution and way of life. Slavery had been a “sectional and revolting inhumanity ,” a fact that now seemed established in the historical record.3 The varied rituals of honoring the war dead that were emerging prompted further reflections on the past. When editor George Curtis discussed the erection of monuments to fallen Union soldiers, he suggested that some might question the practice precisely because it kept disturbing memories of a terrible conflict alive. But he insisted that northern soldiers had given their lives for a “holy cause” and deserved to be commemorated. Southerners, whose cause had been neither holy nor just, would also recall the war but would not be able to honor their dead in the same way. “The descendants of the soldiers of ‘the lost cause,’ however they may extol the honesty with which the political view was held, and the bravery with which the cause was defended,” Curtis wrote, “will never be proud that ancestors of theirs fought heroically to perpetuate human slavery.” The day would come when northerners and southerners would share common recollections of the war’s meaning and agree over the righteousness of ending slavery.4 Yet, despite the often-stated assurances in the pages of northern monthly journals that, as one put it, “neither you, indeed, nor any other sensible man will expect that we shall forget the causes or the circumstances of the struggle,” not long after the war commentators were realizing that the passage of time could alter the relationship between the past and the present. In two articles written for Putnam’s Magazine in 1868, Van Buren Denslow praised the tremendous achievements of war and reconstruction. Emancipation and black suffrage both represented victories for freedom. But these victories were fragile and unstable. As the war became a “historic memory ” rather than “an ever-present crisis,” the reform momentum fueling the Republicans during the war was losing energy. Northern Democrats and Republicans alike harbored “repugnance” for “negro equality.” Northern public opinion was “unsettled” on the question of universal suffrage. Rather than viewing the country as one big antislavery society, Denslow pointed out that the passage of time was playing its part in reducing any commitment to reform goals.5 Denslow’s...

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