The abolitionist movement was an awe-inspiring mass movement that shook the foundations of American capitalism and white supremacy, and laid the foundations for all future revolutionary struggles in the United States.
It is fascinating to trace the rise of the movement, which is done in a sweeping fashion in Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016). The main wave of abolitionism began in the early 1830s, riding the aftershocks of the two great slave rebellions of 1831: Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia, and the Baptist War in Jamaica. In the beginning, abolitionists in the US were a fringe and ostracized group; those who pushed for the abolition of slavery, such as the followers of William Lloyd Garrison and his famous newspaper The Liberator, were routinely targeted by violent mobs lead by law enforcement officials and politicians, who attacked meetings and destroyed buildings and printing presses owned by abolitionists. Garrison himself was almost killed in least one such occasion. These ruling-class riots took place in the North, in cities like Cincinnati, where in 1836 the mayor organized a mob to attack the home of a local abolitionist, which then turned into indiscriminate attacks on black homes and churches. In the South, antislavery politics was explicitly illegal, and underground organizing was routinely smashed apart with the full force of state repression.
However, such violence also had the effect of increasing revulsion against the anti-democratic and anti-civil liberties tendencies of the proslavery elites, and correspondingly spread sympathy for, and interest in, the cause of abolition. The militant wing of abolitionism started to work in earnest to help escaped slaves remain free, forming the Underground Railroad, which helped Frederick Douglass escape from slavery in 1838. Indeed, the Underground Railroad initiated a kind of feedback loop, where fugitive slaves would grow the ranks of abolitionism and become its most militant and dedicated cadre, increasing the capacity to help free more slaves and agitate against the power of the slaveholders. Abolitionism received a further boost in the late 1840s, when popular revolutions erupted in Europe, and radical exiles migrated to the US, bringing with them fierce antislavery sentiments, socialist politics, and combat experience.
In the 1850s, abolitionism grew into a true mass movement; its primary social base was free black communities across the North, but as a coalition it included white urban laborers and farmers. The popularity and militancy of abolitionism during this time period is especially clear in the many cases of unrest that took place whenever authorities attempted to apprehend and extradite fugitive slaves. Multiracial crowds numbering in the thousands, would rally and attack cops and slave catchers, break into jails and courthouses, and forcibly rescue captured slaves. This was not just spontaneous popular violence, either; it was often coordinated and organized by local “Vigilance Committees”, set up by abolitionists as part of the Underground Railroad. The first major rescue was the 1851 rescue of Shadrach Minkins in Boston, and the last was the 1860 rescue of Charles Nalle in Troy, Pennsylvania (which involved none another than Harriet Tubman herself, who just happened to be in town on her way to Boston). Meanwhile, in the world of electoral politics, the Republican Party emerged in 1854 as a popular antislavery party that brought together abolitionists, Northern workers and farmers, and certain segments of Northern capitalists. Six short years later it would seize control of the presidency, precipitating the Civil War and the full emancipation of all slaves in the US.
One important dynamic to emphasize, and which is the central thesis in Sinha’s tome, is that abolition was driven by the slaves themselves, acting in their own self-interest. This sometimes took the form of spectacular rebellions that captured the national imagination, such as Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, and the Amistad rebellion in 1839. But it was also driven by the simple act of running away; it is estimated that something on the order of 50,000 slaves ran away each year during the antebellum period. It was this literal mass movement that underpinned the importance of the Underground Railroad and its associated networks and organizations, which both spread propaganda about the plight of the enslaved, as well as coordinated concrete assistance to fugitives in the form of food, shelter, transportation, and weapons. White and free abolitionists did not create abolitionism; they simply joined and expanded a movement that was already underway, initialized by slave resistance that had been present since slavery was brought to the US.
There were a number of strategic debates and controversies within the abolitionist movement that parallel issues in radical politics today. Notwithstanding the explosive rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s, there were fierce debates among abolitionists about electoral politics, whether to engage in elections, and how to work with politicians whose goals overlapped those of abolitionists, but who weren’t actual abolitionists. These debates intersected with debates over “revolution vs. reform”, and whether the Constitution and the federal government was amenable to becoming an anti-slavery force, or whether disunion or insurrection was the only viable path forward.
This also, of course, raised debates about violence; many abolitionists were “non-resistors”, although most of them simultaneously defended and even celebrated the slave’s right to violently rebel. There was also the messy contradictions of coalition-building, especially when it came to electoral politics; the successful expansion of antislavery sentiment was coupled with the fact that many held antislavery views out of racism, and a desire to keep slavery, and therefore, black people, out of the new territories – which, of course, were being seized from various Native American nations. Abolitionists thus had to grapple with the problem of how to balance the costs and benefits made by such coalitional politics, and whether supporting a particular politician or campaign against slavery would be worth the costs to wider goals around anti-racism and equality.
Another interesting and relevant dynamic is the way that slaveholder power evolved during the rise of abolitionism. Contrary to certain teleological narratives, slavery was not automatically withering away due to industrialization. On the contrary, it was on the upswing in the 1850s, with southern elites in firm control of the federal government, and working to build an empire of slavery, based on reopening the slave trade and expanding US colonial holdings into the Caribbean and Central America. New laws, such as the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, and the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court case, were expanding the power and rights of slaveholders across the country. And where law and order wasn’t enough, outright violence was used, as seen in the 1830s, and later in “Bleeding Kansas“, when proslavery gangs from Missouri invaded Kansas to attack free-state settlers and rig elections. In some respects, this aggression was a response to the growing power of abolitionism, and an effort by elites to maintain their position in the face of rising opposition by a combination of law and brute force.
This gets into what is one of the most interesting lessons from abolitionism: the way radical politics, violence, and polarization interact with one another. Faced with violent suppression from its very origins, and dealing with a system that was fundamentally rooted in physical violence and coercion, abolitionism had to develop practices of self-defense and armed struggle from the beginning. As time went on, abolitionist use of violence became increasingly confident and sophisticated, and rooted in mass mobilization; this is one way to understand the emergence of the Underground Railroad, and the popularity of direct action against law enforcement in defense of fugitive slaves. John Brown and his fellow travelers escalated this further, first in matching the violence of proslavery forces in Kansas in the mid-1850s, and then by attempting to instigate a full-scale slave revolution in Virginia with the Raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party, despite its composition from relatively moderate forces, also helped lay the groundwork for the both the massification and the militarization of abolition. Matt Karp’s excellent essay in Catalyst, “The Mass Politics of Antislavery“, lays out a compelling overview of the Republican Party as a party marked by its mass politics and antislavery platform, which effectively utilized both popular mobilization and electoral contests to battle against the power of the southern slaveholders. Especially interesting in Karp’s narrative is the Wide-Awake movement,
which enlisted perhaps 100,000 Northern young men into something like a grassroots Republican paramilitary organization. Mostly wage-workers and farmers, Wide-Awakes from Maine to Minnesota formed themselves into companies with ranks and officers, donning soldiers’ caps and dark cloaks for midnight infantry drills. Their theatrical torchlight parades, accompanied by brass and drums, under banners celebrating “Free Labor,” “Free Land,” and “Lincoln, Liberator of Slavery,” attracted hundreds of thousands more awestruck spectators, and testified to the martial intensity of Northern popular feeling.
The Wide-Awakes are a fascinating case of how the lines between social movements, electoral politics, and military conflict can become blurred. The Wide-Awakes were initially organized by the Republican Party as a supplement to its 1860 election campaigning, but they also served as a self-defense organization to protect Republican politicians from disruption and assault from proslavery thugs. The following year, when the Civil War started in earnest, Wide-Awake locals became a crucial military force; in Missouri, the local Wide-Awake chapter mobilized and successfully defended a federal military arsenal from being captured by Confederate militias. But they also, in some respects, helped instigate the Civil War itself; the formation of such a paramilitary force, combined with events like John Brown’s raid in 1859, convinced the southern slaveholding elite that regardless of Lincoln’s intentions, there was no future in the union with such popular antislavery forces unleashed and growing by the day.
It is also worth noting how, during the Civil War, the movement of fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad also became militarized. Many militant abolitionists enlisted with the Union Army and helped spread armed struggle into the Confederacy. They carried out spectacular campaigns like the famous Raid on Combahee Ferry – lead by Harriet Tubman and James Montgomery, a veteran of Bleeding Kansas – a lightning-strike attack which freed ~750 slaves and destroyed a number of plantations. Pretty much all of the men who were freed by Tubman and Montgomery immediately enlisted to fight the slaveholders: an example of how quasi-guerrilla attacks by abolitionists in the Union Army merged with slave resistance ratcheting up to a revolutionary pitch. In what Bruce Levine in an essay for Jacobin calls the “Second American Revolution,” tens of thousands of slaves abandoned the plantations, crossed over to the Union, picked up guns, and then turned right back around to help free their friends and families.
By the end of the war, some 200,000 black men had served in the Union army or navy, most of them recruited in slave states. Black soldiers took part in about 450 military engagements, some 40 of which were major battles, and they provided the Union with 120 infantry regiments, 12 heavy artillery regiments, 10 batteries of light artillery, and seven cavalry regiments. They were crucial to the eventual victory.
After reading such a history, it is impossible to not view abolitionism as foundational to the revolutionary current in the US. Indeed, Sinha’s close reading of the intellectual currents within abolitionism reveals it to be a remarkable echo of contemporary radicalism; abolitionists not only fought against slavery, but also actively connected the movement to movements around women’s rights, indigenous sovereignty, anti-imperialism, and class struggle.
One can trace the afterlives of abolitionism in the movements that came afterwards. Many abolitionists were unsurprisingly at the forefront of Radical Reconstruction and the battle to preserve black socio-economic and political power in the South against a vicious counter-revolution. When this gave way to the Gilded Age of industrialization and elite power, these veterans went on to build and influence radical and multiracial movements like the Populists and the Knights of Labor. These, in turn, were the forerunners of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World of the 1910s and 1920s, which would then give way to the Communist Party and its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Communist organizing laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and would come back in a much more explicit and militant fashion with the Black Power Movement and New Communist Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. After that, there seems to be an abyss in terms of revolutionary continuity – but the ongoing uprisings in 2020 against police violence and for Black Lives has, of course, the unmistakable imprint of abolitionism and this 150-year current of popular American radicalism.
Tagged: 1800s, abolition, history, politics, revolution, slavery, socialism
Jnana Yuddha 
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