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By Root 1753 0

concerning a post-slavery America. The crusade against slavery, wrote Angelina Grimké, the daughter of a South Carolina slaveholder who became an outspoken abolitionist and feminist, was the nation’s preeminent “school in which human rights are…investigated.” Abolitionists played a crucial role in giving new meaning to ideas such as personal liberty, political community, and the rights that attached to American citizenship. They insisted on the “Americanness” of slaves and free blacks, a position summarized in the title of Lydia Maria Child’s popular treatise of 1833, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Child’s text insisted that blacks were compatriots, not foreigners; they should no more be considered Africans than white Englishmen. The abolitionist idea of egalitarian birthright citizenship, later enshrined in the Constitution by the Fourteenth Amendment, was a radical departure from the traditions and practices of American life.45

The first racially integrated social movement in American history, abolitionism was also the first to insist on the inextricable connection between the struggles against slavery and racism. “While the word ‘white’ is on the statute-book of Massachusetts,” declared the abolitionist editor Edmund Quincy, “Massachusetts is a slave state.” Abolitionists challenged both southern slavery and the racial proscription that confined free blacks to second-class status throughout the nation. In the ideas of a national citizenship and of equal rights for all Americans, abolitionists glimpsed the possibility, which came to fruition during the Civil War, that the national state might become the guarantor of freedom and equality rather than its enemy.46

Initially, the federal government and many private citizens responded to the crusade against slavery by attempting to suppress it. The House of Representatives in 1836 adopted the notorious gag rule, prohibiting the consideration of abolitionist petitions. Throughout the 1830s, northern mobs (well over a hundred by one count) broke up meetings of abolitionists and destroyed their printing presses. Nonetheless, between the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and the end of the decade, somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 northerners joined local groups dedicated to the abolition of slavery and equal rights for black Americans.47

As abolitionism spread, a chasm opened between the movement and the American Colonization Society. Colonizationists often included the most prominent members of local communities. They not only found abolitionists’ ideas unacceptable, but resented their efforts to organize ordinary citizens outside existing channels of authority. Colonizationists instigated and participated in the anti-abolitionist riots that swept the North in the mid-1830s. Among numerous supporters of colonization who viewed the abolitionists as “exerting the most unhappy influence” was Henry Clay, who feared that the emergence of abolitionism had set back hopes for ending slavery by “half a century.” White southerners, he warned in 1839, would never accept the creation of a large class of free blacks who enjoyed equal rights. Therefore, if abolitionist views became widespread in the North, the inevitable result would be a bloody civil war.48

While no longer the main embodiment of white antislavery sentiment, colonization survived as part of the broad spectrum of ideas relating to slavery and abolition. This was particularly true in Illinois, where, until the mid-1830s, what antislavery sentiment existed took the form of colonizationism. The founding meeting of the Illinois Colonization Society, in 1830, attracted both genuine foes of slavery and those primarily concerned with ridding the state of free blacks. Among those present was former governor Edward Coles, who, as noted earlier, had emancipated his own slaves, brought them to Illinois, and fought for repeal of the state’s Black Laws. By 1830, Coles had concluded that blacks could never enjoy full freedom in the United States. Also present was Cyrus Edwards,