The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [15]
The black mobilization against colonization formed one of the key catalysts for the rise of a new, militant abolitionism in the late 1820s and 1830s. Compared to previous antislavery organizations that promoted gradual emancipation, compensation, and colonization, abolitionism was different: immediatist, interracial, rejecting payment to slaveholders for their slaves, and committed to making the United States a biracial nation. The abolitionist movement arose as the joining of two impulses—black anti-colonization and white evangelicism and perfectionism. In his influential 1832 pamphlet, Thoughts on African Colonization, the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison explained that his experience with the vibrant black communities of Baltimore and Boston inspired his conversion from colonization to abolition and racial equality. The most potent objection to colonization, he wrote, was that it “is directly and irreconcilably opposed to the wishes of our colored population as a body.” White abolitionists of the 1830s, most of whom, like Garrison, had previously been sympathetic to colonization, now denounced the American Colonization Society for intensifying racial prejudice in America. The New York merchant and religious reformer Lewis Tappan, another former colonizationist who embraced immediate abolitionism, called on Henry Clay to recognize the society’s ineffectiveness. “Slavery is rapidly increasing,” he wrote to Clay in 1835. “Colonization has not, nor will it…diminish slavery. What is to be done? I answer, emancipate.” Clearly annoyed, Clay responded that northerners had no right to speak about slavery in the South.41
In 1795, the Virginia critic of slavery St. George Tucker inquired of the Massachusetts clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap how his state had abolished slavery. Belknap replied, “Slavery hath been abolished here by public opinion.” Understanding the importance of public sentiment, abolitionists pioneered the practice of radical agitation in a democracy. They did not put forward a detailed plan of emancipation. Rather, their aim, explained Wendell Phillips, perhaps the movement’s greatest orator, was “to alter public opinion,” to bring about a moral transformation whereby white Americans recognized the humanity and equal rights of blacks. By changing public discourse, by redefining the politically “possible,” the abolitionist movement affected far more Americans than actually joined its ranks.42
Abolitionists seized on the weapons available to them—petitions, lectures, and the newly invented steam press, which made possible the mass production of pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides—to challenge the conspiracy of silence that increasingly barred discussion of slavery from the national public sphere.43 The movement appealed simultaneously to the hearts and minds of Americans, excoriating slaveowners and exposing the brutal reality of slavery—whippings, separation of families, and so on—while also condemning slavery for destroying “the influence which our otherwise free and republican institutions are justly entitled to in the world.” Abolitionists pioneered the argument that the founders were explicitly or implicitly antislavery and expected the institution’s demise. They tried to appropriate the Declaration of Independence for their cause, interpreting the Declaration (as Lincoln would later do) as a condemnation of slavery. The words of Jefferson’s preamble affirming the equality of man graced the front page of every issue of Zebina Eastman’s abolitionist newspaper, the Western Citizen, published in Chicago beginning in 1842. Abolitionists also argued for the superiority of free labor to slave, and insisted that slavery illegitimately denied slaves the fruits of their labor. Many critics of slavery, including Lincoln, who never thought of themselves as abolitionists, came to articulate ideas and themes that had first appeared in abolitionist writings.44
Where abolitionists diverged most profoundly from their contemporaries, including less radical critics of slavery, lay in their views