The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic

by Richard S. Newman

Most accounts date the birth of American abolitionism to 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his radical antislavery newspaper, The Liberator. In fact, however, the abolition movement had been born with the American Republic. In the decades following the Revolution, abolitionists worked steadily to eliminate slavery and racial injustice, and their tactics and strategies constantly evolved. Tracing the development of the abolitionist movement from the 1770s to the 1830s, Richard Newman focuses particularly on its transformation from a conservative lobbying effort into a fiery grassroots reform cause.

What began in late-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania as an elite movement espousing gradual legal reform began to change in the 1820s as black activists, female reformers, and nonelite whites pushed their way into the antislavery movement. Located primarily in Massachusetts, these new reformers demanded immediate emancipation, and they revolutionized abolitionist strategies and tactics — lecturing extensively, publishing gripping accounts of life in bondage, and organizing on a grassroots level. Their attitudes and actions made the abolition movement the radical cause we view it as today.

Genres: History, Race

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Richard Newman (Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo) is Professor of History at Rochester Institute of Technology. He directs the Library Company of Philadelphia and specializes in the study of American reformers in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, including early black leaders, abolitionists, and modern environmentalists.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lucid and straightforward, though perhaps too straightforward. Newman aims to show that American abolitionism was a well-organized movement even in the earliest years of the American republic. He argues that the institutional strength of early abolitionism has remained obscure because abolitionism changed significantly between the 1790s and the 1830s. He uses two leading organizations to represent the two major phases of the movement: the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), established in 1775 and dominant in the movement until the 1820s, and the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS), founded in 1832 by reformers dissatisfied with the PAS's conservative approach. Far from having sprung suddenly into existence, Newman argues, the abolitionism of the NEASS continued a tradition that was as old as the country.

The PAS took a conservative approach to the problem of slavery. It was far from apolitical, however. Deriving directly from Pennsylvania Quakerism's long-time hostility to slaveowning, the PAS rejected Quakerism's political quietism. The PAS, which recruited "weighty and influential" citizens like Benjamin Franklin (its first president) to bolster its respectability, specialized in legislative petitions and in litigation. PAS petitions assumed the dignity of the law and the wisdom of legislators; they were respectful, even deferential, and were aimed at persuasion rather than electoral compulsion. PAS litigation, meanwhile, aimed at particular states and particular cases. Tireless work by Pennsylvania lawyers defended state abolition laws, protected the freedom of many runaways, and even secured the freedom of some slaves by exploiting legal technicalities. By the 1830s, however, reformers like William Lloyd Garrison, Amos Phelps, and Thomas Shipley were convinced that these efforts were inadequate.

Newman attributes the immediatism of these "second-wave" reformers largely to black journalism. Throughout the PAS's existence, black reformers had sought to win support for firmer measures. Excluded from the mainstream public sphere, black writers established their own publications to combat stereotypes, document the human cost of slavery, and make a claim for equal citizenship. Their work directly inspired Garrison and other white immediatists, and it provided evidence to support their claims about the evils of the institution.

When the NEASS was established in Massachusetts, therefore, it became the first racially integrated abolitionist society. It was also more democratic in another sense than the PAS; it aimed to mobilize the American people to demand an immediate end to slavery, not merely present humble memorials to American leaders. It would include women and youth in its campaigns. Furthermore, it would apply the strategy of mass mobilization to the courts of justice as well as state assemblies. In these respects, Newman writes, the NEASS both reflected and contributed to a larger democratic shift in the American political nation. NEASS organizing was crucial to bringing women, blacks, and even rural citizens generally into the public sphere. Its "agents" spread out across Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Michigan in the 1830s and 1840s, establishing daughter societies in the countryside and recruiting 10,000 citizens to the cause. Although the movement fragmented in the 1840s because of internal dissension, Newman concludes, it forced the United States at large to face some of the most important contradictions in American life. It did this precisely by appealing directly to the ideals of the Founding, continuing by other means the critique developed by the Pennsylvania abolitionists.

One obvious weakness with Newman's study is his inclusive use of the term abolitionism. One might argue that Newman too easily assumes continuity between one form of antislavery agitation and another. However, it is clear that the Pennsylvania reformers no less than later New Englanders were working toward the eventual abolition of slavery, not merely its curtailment, and were doing so in an organized and politically astute way; thus, Newman's usage of the term is defensible. This, however, leaves open the question of how many other forms of "abolitionism" there might have been in the United States during this period. Perhaps the story of abolition should be told as the story of many rising and fading loci of opposition rather than as the supplanting of one society by another.

This brings us to Newman's key weakness, which several reviewers have noted: he focuses narrowly on the legal and political work of two antislavery societies. He is concerned with organization rather than ideology, and thus neglects the role of Protestant revivalism in preparing America for mass social reform movements. He also neglects other societies in the United States and especially Britain -- the latter country being vital to understanding the abolitionism of the 1830s.

In other respects, however, The Transformation of American Abolitionism is unusually clear and persuasive. This book is well organized, and it provides a fascinating look at antislavery legal work. Given the failure of the "second wave" to attain abolition prior to the Civil War, one comes away with the impression that the PAS's dogged pursuit of justice for individual slaves was actually one of the most important campaigns of the battle against bondage. The book would be worth reading for that account alone.

[Karen]

* Understanding Oppression: African American Rights (Then and Now)

The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic by Richard S. Newman #slavery #abolition