Abolitionism and the World It Made

Libary Company of Philadelphia

For those who question the political efficacy of social movements, abolitionism is an arresting example of the possible. Beginning in small ways during the last third of the 18th century, abolitionism became an international movement that took on the most deeply entrenched and economically formidable institution on the face of the globe: African-descended slavery. Indeed, until the 18th century, slavery and other regimes of servile labor were the norms in human society, and the only challenges to them came from a handful of philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals who had virtually no following. Then, owing to important shifts in political economy, cultural practice, and moral sensibility, the foundations for something much bigger were laid.

Antislavery societies in Britain, France, and the United States were organized and commenced to mobilize public opinion. They first set their sights on the international slave trade but very soon took aim at slavery itself, and over the course of a century (1777-1888) saw slave emancipation sweep across the Western Hemisphere. The vortex of revolution and the halls of legislatures alike were the scenes of slavery’s destruction, but nowhere could it have happened without the remarkable efforts of the abolitionists.

The drama and significance of this great movement have attracted the attention of some of our most gifted and perceptive historians. They have not only explored the complex dynamics of abolitionism but also placed the movement in an international context, encompassing the Atlantic and, increasingly, the Indian Ocean worlds. With The Slave’s Cause Manisha Sinha, an historian at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, joins their company.

One might ask, What more is left to say? Historians have examined a great many pieces of the abolition story, and we have been fortunate to have sweeping accounts that rank among the finest examples of historical writing on any subject. But there have also been interpretive controversies — about the important actors, tensions within the movement, abolition’s place in the development of capitalism and imperialism, the intersections of race and gender — and Sinha takes on some of the most significant of them.

The Slave’s Cause is indeed a work of heft. Sinha focuses on the United States, though she is well aware of abolitionism’s transnational dimensions, and she takes us from the late 18th century through the Civil War and the eventual completion of emancipation. Her research is deep and wide-ranging, and she both reacquaints us with familiar historical figures and introduces us to those who may not be familiar. She offers close readings of abolitionist texts, pays keen attention to how the movement was built, and enables us to look at abolitionism from inside and outside. Despite the large historiography in which it is embedded, The Slave’s Cause takes its place as a starting point for anyone interested in the history of abolitionism.

Impressive as is the empirical basis of her book, Sinha doesn’t miss the forest for the trees. Her claims, in fact, are large, as are their implications. Foremost, perhaps, is her insistence on the significance of black actors in the “slave’s cause.” This argument is by no means new. Although scholars of abolition had long privileged the intellectual and organizational work of white men and women, in recent years the crucial roles of African-Americans in directing and sustaining the movement have been compellingly demonstrated. But no one has made the case as fully as has Sinha. She argues that abolitionism was an interracial movement from the outset, and that it was the black abolitionists who drove the movement forward and conceived of the cause in the most far-reaching ways. William Lloyd Garrison, the iconic advocate of “immediatism,” she shows us, learned his politics from black activists in Baltimore in the late 1820s.

Even more consequentially, slave resistance itself was central to the success of the abolitionist project. Slave rebellions in the Caribbean as well as within the borders of the United States helped bring general emancipation to the attention of legislatures across the Atlantic world; without those rebellions, abolitionism would have been a tame and hollow enterprise. Individual rebels may have energized the movement in still more crucial ways: the many enslaved men and women who fled their captivity in the South and headed North. It was they who brought slavery’s dehumanization home to free Northerners, they who spoke and wrote about the travails of slavery and their dreams of freedom, they who challenged the laws that upheld slavery, and they who made compromise over the future of slavery impossible to maintain.

The central role of African-Americans from beginning to end is related to another of Sinha’s arguments. Although abolitionism went through phases — she calls them the “first wave” and “second wave” — the movement’s history, she insists, was marked by a fundamental continuity of radicalism. By this she means abolitionism’s longstanding commitments to emancipation, grass-roots mobilization, democratic process, racial equality, and women’s and labor rights. Here she takes on a large scholarship that has emphasized the ways in which abolitionism was contaminated by racism and hedged by gradualism, legitimated other relations of exploitation and subordination, advanced the claims of nascent capitalists, and provided moral support for imperialism. She acknowledges those tendencies but argues forcefully — if not quite convincingly — against them.

There is little doubt that abolitionism represented a radical force in the Atlantic world of the 18th and 19th centuries, and we would be mistaken to ignore it. Yet there were different currents of radicalism either moving along parallel paths or working at cross-purposes. Abolitionists, as Sinha shows, called into question various forms of power and domination and thereby defined new conceptions of human rights and social relations; some came to imagine an interracial future and expansive notions of political belonging. Radical Republicanism, as Sinha points out, was deeply indebted to abolitionism, and former slaves who demanded voting rights and access to landed independence took cues from their understanding of abolitionist intentions.

Still, the strongest current of abolitionist radicalism was bourgeois in character, and while it undermined the morality of property in persons, it simultaneously lent cultural sanction to new relations that could be highly exploitative because they appeared to be mediated by voluntary exchanges in the marketplace. This, together with the virtual sanctification of self-ownership, was abolitionism’s greatest gift to the new system of capitalism and to capitalists who sought moral validation. It was not incidental, either, that the embrace and legacy of emancipationism fortified the sense of cultural superiority that many Americans carried into their imperial projects in the hemisphere and overseas.

Thus the complex package that abolitionism came to represent in the development of the United States. Yet radical movements for change are never uncomplicated. At their best, they provide meeting grounds for activists who can challenge one another to turn visions into programs, and to test new approaches to popular mobilization. Invariably they produce conflict as well as cooperation as they encounter power in its different forms. Win or lose, they often fracture. And fracture abolitionism did, but not without building one of the great popular movements in our history and helping to achieve one of the great goals in the history of the modern world. Today’s activists, as Manisha Sinha seems to imply, would do well to heed the admonition of one of abolitionism’s towering figures, Frederick Douglass: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

Steven Hahn is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World, 1830-1910, forthcoming from Viking Press.