Abolitionists worked hard, and with remarkable success, to formulate what I call the Antislavery Project, an agenda, a series of specific policies that were designed to stop and then reverse the expansion of slavery, policies that would—as Lincoln later explained—put slavery on “a course of ultimate extinction.” By the 1850s abolitionists had succeeded in restoring the problem of slavery to the heart of American politics. They were now part of a vast and increasingly powerful antislavery movement, a coalition that embraced the majority of northern voters. That coalition, known as the
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