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It is a continuing puzzle to me that Americans know so little about abolition. This great social movement began with barely a handful of men and women, faced fierce and violent opposition, convinced half the country to view slavery as morally wrong, and ultimately created the moral crisis of the Civil War. This is the sort of tale you want to tell schoolchildren. However, nobody tells this story to schoolchildren, or to anybody else. Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War are endlessly masticated as though they suddenly popped into history full grown, their brooding ambiguities already formed. This is like studying World War II without mentioning Nazism, or Jesus without Israel.
Perhaps we forget the abolitionists because even today they make us face the unresolved guilty ambiguities of race. The abolitionists were first to recognize race as fundamentally a moral issue—not political or economic or biological. Even more, they stuck racial immorality in the face of their fellow citizens until America had to deal with it. We, like the abolitionists' contemporaries, would rather read American history as economics, politics, or war, all done and gone and having little claim on our lives.
Recently at Princeton Seminary I saw a plaque dedicated to Princeton graduate Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist who, according to the plaque, gave his life fighting for the freedom of the press. I had to laugh at that. What an extremely odd way to summarize the life and death of an abolitionist editor who was murdered while he tried to keep a mob from dumping yet another of his printing presses into the Mississippi River. Lovejoy believed in the freedom of the press, certainly, but that was not what he died for. No abstract constitutional principle could have so captured his life; it is purely a twentieth-century fantasy to put it so. He died for the slaves, because he believed Christ had commanded him to share in their struggle.
Such a twisting of history would never have been done by Paul Goodman, the University of California at Davis historian who died just before completing Of One Blood. Goodman spent most of his career studying the social and economic transformations of early nineteenth-century America. Only near the end of his illustrious career did he come to this great and enigmatic movement. Yet Goodman seems to understand the mind of abolitionists better than any historian I have read, and he is able to place them in their social setting in a thoroughly convincing way. In doing so, he explodes several myths that have grown up among historians of the period.
One is that abolitionism began as an uneasy alliance of Finneyite evangelicals and free-thinking Transcendentalist Bostonians, and therefore never had any internal consistency of thought. This is an easy mistake to make, if you read the history backward. The abolitionists ended up greatly divided, speaking quite different languages of reform. One could easily imagine that they were a patched-together coalition from the be ginning. This, however, is to misread history in a fundamental way, failing to understand that inherent in the reforming evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening were several possible directions.
Abolitionists were those willing to follow the conclusions of Christian faith rigorously, however much it might force them to oppose the society they lived in. As time went on, however, they split over how the gospel spoke to society. For William Lloyd Garrison and his followers in Boston, the gospel demanded that every aspect of society be torn down and re built, including family, government, and church. Their slogan was "no human government," and they flirted with a kind of utopian anarchy. The more moderate New York faction of abolitionists wanted to focus on slavery as the key American evil. Apart from slavery, they thought that family, government, and church had enough redeeming elements to work with. These two possibilities—revolution and reform, if you will—have always been potential in activist Christian faith, and still are.
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