Abolitionism: Part One: a study in political action

The beginning of organised, militant abolitionism in the United States is usually dated to 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison began publication of The Liberator. At the time, abolitionists were reviled as threats to America’s freedom and security, whose agitation would apparently encourage slave revolts, divide the nation along sectional lines, and lead to the ‘amalgamation of the races’. Abolitionists were lynched and singled out for criticism by President Andrew Jackson, their meetings were interrupted, and their buildings torched. Somehow, their cause went from nowhere in 1831 to ultimate success in 1865 (with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment), and how it did so provides an excellent illustration in how political change is effected.

Despite the abolitionists’ small numbers and their status as a despised minority, their mere presence on the country’s political scene scared the Southern planter elite and its northern allies. Famously, the freedoms of speech and petition enunciated in the First Amendment began to be breached in the 1830s, when Congress refused to receive abolitionist petitions (the ‘gag rule’) and the federal government used its control over the postal service to limit the dissemination of abolitionist propaganda. The accusations levelled at abolitionists verged on the conspiratorial (the accusation of being in favour of miscegenation was common and damning). The measures taken by the defenders of slavery, both legal and extra-legal, were usually far out of proportion to the abolitionists’ influence, and fuelled the development of a narrative about the ‘Slave Power’ exerting its control over the country which became a staple of later anti-slavery rhetoric.

The abolitionist cause began to pick up steam, and its arguments began to win converts beyond its original Whig/evangelical base. One such convert was William Leggett, a radical Jacksonian journalist in New York. Leggett had originally been repelled by early abolitionists’ religious zeal, and shared the common idea of the time about them being subversives. Throughout the 1830s, as Leggett applied his political principles to the question of slavery (he was close to the radical free-market ‘Locofoco’ wing of the New York Democratic Party), he found it impossible to defend the institution and became an abolitionist. It was through the likes of Leggett that abolitionism spread beyond that Whig/evangelical base and found a home in certain factions of the Democracy (notably among Martin van Buren’s followers in the Empire State).

As they began to acquire political power, abolitionists began to endorse (and refuse to endorse) candidates for office. Though still a small minority of the population, they were well-organised enough to be the swing demographic in various congressional races. (Admittedly, they were also assisted by support from abroad, especially after slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833.) Prospective candidates who sought the abolitionist vote were given questionnaires by anti-slavery organisations, and their voting records vetted to ensure that they had never supported the Southern cause. These methods have become an essential part of American political culture, where, due to the lack of tight party discipline, the voting records and published opinions of individual candidates can often be more important than their partisan affiliation.

After the questionnaires, the next step, given that abolitionists lacked the numbers to take over the Democratic or Whig parties, was the formation of a third party. The first such endeavour, the Liberty Party, failed to make an impact in the 1840 or 1844 presidential elections, but the growth in anti-slavery feeling helped the Free Soil Party (whose ticket was headed by former President van Buren) in 1848, which ran second in New York and (arguably) attracted enough Democratic voters to throw the election to the Whig ticket. In doing so, abolitionists continued their multi-faceted strategy: they built a base in each of the major parties, used third-party candidacies to force the major parties to move further towards their ideals in order to capture their votes, developed an ideology which drew from both Democratic and Whig ideas (the ‘free labor’ thought most famously analysed by Eric Foner), created a (quasi-conspiratorial) narrative about their enemy (the ‘Slave Power’), and supplemented these with direct action.

During the 1850s, the salience of the slavery question caused a major realignment in the party system. The old system of competition between Democrats (economically egalitarian, pro-westward expansion, anti-Sabbatarian) and Whigs (pro-commerce, evangelical, nativist) ended with the Whigs’ demise after the 1852 presidential election. Thereafter, Whigs in southern and border states and among the merchant elite of major northern cities (who had business dealings with the southern planter elite) moved en masse into what was once the party of the working class, while anti-slavery elements in both major parties joined third-party and non-party activists in Ripon, Wisconsin (a former socialist commune) in 1854 to found the Republican Party. Thanks to the polarisation of public opinion brought about by the abolitionists, the Jackson-van Buren model of a two-party system cross-cutting (and thus overcoming) sectional allegiances was rendered unsustainable, and the United States now had a northern/anti-slavery party facing a southern/pro-slavery one. (That is, once the Know-Nothings, who represented the final attempt of political actors to find an issue to distract from the slavery question, disappeared.)

The results of the 1860 presidential election. Shades of blue represent counties carried by Abraham Lincoln; red, Stephen Douglas (the northern Democrat); yellow/brown, John C. Breckinridge (the southern Democrat); and green, John Bell (last of the southern Whigs).

As the anti-slavery cause was pursued electorally by the Republicans, militant abolitionists continued to polarise public opinion. In Kansas, they fought a dress rehearsal for the Civil War against pro-slavery settlers, and in 1859 a federal arsenal in Virginia (later, West Virginia) was attacked in a rather farcical fashion by John Brown’s forces. Despite the almost comical failure of Brown’s revolt, the (over-)reaction of the South (where it was believed that Brown would be followed by more abolitionist rabble-rousers) ensured that it would be the spark which ignited the Civil War. The anti-slavery movement was a classic case of militants forcing change while more moderate politicians (such as Lincoln) could reap the benefits of their actions while making conciliatory noises to slaveholders.

Although the rationale for the Civil War offered by the Union was initially based around the idea of keeping the country together, by its end, the war had come to be seen as having been fought for the purpose of emancipating the slaves. The demands of the war made it impossible not to recruit black troops into the Union army, and the slaves who escaped and fled to the Union lines couldn’t be sent home. The system of race relations in America changed with a frenetic pace: in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation freed most of the slaves (immediately and without compensation, in stark contrast to the British experience in 1833), in 1865, slavery was banished forever by the Thirteenth Amendment, and in 1868, sixty former slaves and thirty non-slaveholding whites formed the bulk of the 125-member South Carolina constitutional convention. For a brief, shining moment, it seemed that the abolitionists had triumphed, and that the United States would move from being a republic of white men to an egalitarian, multi-racial society.