| Contents |
The Dilemma of the Secession Winter -- The Onset of Civil War, April-May 1861 -- An Interventionist Strategy Emerges, June-Mid-July 1861 -- The Impact of Bull Run, Late July-August 1861 -- The Rise of the Emancipation League, September-December 1861 -- On to Washington, January-March 1862 -- Imagining Reconstructions, March-September 1862 -- The Afterglow of Emancipation, September 1862-January 1863 -- The Stirrings of Realignment, February-June 1863 -- The Collapse of the Interventionists, June-December 1863 -- The Competing Conventions, January-June 1864 -- The Perils of Abolitionist Politicking, June-December 1864 -- The End of Wartime Abolitionism, January-May 1865. |
| Abstract |
"Frank Cirillo's "The Abolitionist Civil War" examines the dramatic transformation of the abolitionist movement during the American Civil War, specifically its far-reaching origins, shifting contours, and drastic consequences for both abolitionism and the nation. To do so, he focuses on ten figures spanning the race and gender lines of the abolitionist movement: William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, George Cheever, Moncure Conway, Charlotte Forten, Lydia Maria Child, Stephen Foster, Abby Kelley Foster, and Parker Pillsbury. His study extends the story of immediatism deep into the Civil War and beyond, fleshing out its true nature as a morally nationalistic, ideologically multifarious, and politically dynamic movement. It demonstrates how interventionists during the first half of the war helped bring about a Union policy of military emancipation that had seemed far from inevitable, and it explores the unintended but disastrous repercussions of their intervention during the second half of the war, as abolitionism stunted its own power to secure further, lasting change beyond formal emancipation. It tells the tale of a movement whose greatest victory ensured its ultimate failure. In founding their movement in the 1830s, immediate abolitionists, or immediatists, advocated racial justice for justice's sake. However, they also grounded their mission in their own sense of nationalism. They strove as their endgame to construct a morally transformed Union: a land, purged through a moral revolution of its original sin of racial bondage and bigotry, which could fulfill its divine destiny as the lighthouse of democracy. Immediatists premised this moral vision on two commitments: the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people and their inclusion in some form in the post-emancipation polity. Yet the exact dimensions of their delivered nation, and the path toward achieving it, were indefinite and unfixed, precipitating an evolving civil war within abolitionism itself amid the strife of national conflict. While abolitionists originally aspired to achieve their perfect ends through equally perfect means, many grew frustrated in the dark decade before the Civil War. In desperation, they fixated upon jumpstarting their moral revolution through a sudden, apocalyptic crucible, or golden moment. They embraced the Union war at its outbreak in April 1861, hoping to ensure their golden moment by harnessing and reshaping an effort to preserve the Union into a regenerative war for emancipation. To do so, they embarked on a harrowing journey, plunging deeper and deeper into the Union political mainstream in response to military and political developments-and downplaying their extreme moral ambivalence over such actions. Early in the war, interventionists crafted and fleshed out a brilliant strategy, gradually remolding themselves into practitioners of interest-group politics. Uniting in support of the government, they forged arguments about the practical necessity of military emancipation and forged an antislavery alliance with politicos from across the antislavery spectrum to disseminate such points. By late 1863, however, the interventionist camp was in shambles, as wartime abolitionism reconfigured into a messy proxy battle over Lincoln's re-election. As the war ended and the Thirteenth Amendment passed in 1865, the abolitionist movement reoriented itself a third and final time into a naked ideological struggle over the continuation of antislavery reform. Over the cries of broad interventionists and moral purists that the movement had to secure Black civil, political, and socioeconomic equality, Garrison and the narrow interventionists moved to disband its most prominent organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society. Though he failed, he retired to celebrate his attenuated but completed mission, abandoning the movement along with Conway. While Phillips, Douglass, Forten, the Fosters, Pillsbury, and the converted broad interventionists Child and Cheever fought on, theirs was a weakened remnant. Shorn of their significant wartime sway by Garrison, and to a lesser extent by their late electoral compromises, they proved helpless to sustain postwar Reconstruction. Immediatists' fateful intervention in the Union war thus helps explain how they achieved both so much and so little in terms of racial justice"-- Provided by publisher. |
