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Goodman, in noting the common points of view among abolitionists, particularly stresses the evangelical belief in racial equality—that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26). One of the earliest and most common slogans of abolition was a kneeling slave, pleading, "Am I not your brother?" To which most white Americans would have answered, "Certainly not." Racist ideas were dominant in nineteenth-century America. Abolitionists, however, thought no Christian could fail to see the claims of brotherhood transcending race. All the families of the earth were created by God, and all were called to inclusion in one Christian family. This conviction led abolitionists to an initial sympathy with the plight of blacks, who were despised and oppressed in both North and South. As Goodman stresses, the first abolitionists did not merely believe theoretically in racial equality, their convictions led them to listen to black voices.
It was their openness to black argument and feeling that led white abolitionists to come out strongly against the American Colonization Society, which until the 1830s was the only substantial organization claiming to heal the wound of slavery. Colonization, which aimed to send free blacks back to Africa, seemed to many well-meaning whites the only hope. The vociferous opposition of free blacks caused those who would become abolitionists to take a second look, and ultimately to see colonization as a racist assault on free blacks and a convenient dodge for slaveholders. This was the be ginning of abolitionist radicalism, and it did not come from a vacuum but from an active, sympathetic dialogue with blacks.
Goodman also offers valuable in sights into the motives of female abolitionists, whose contributions were so crucial to the movement, and whose consciousness of women's rights grew in the process of fighting for African Americans.
As abolitionists succeeded in drawing others into their crusade against slavery, the movement sometimes lost the strength of its initial commitment to racial equality. It was psychologically and socially difficult to pursue racial brotherhood while your neighbors and friends looked on blacks as subhuman and corrupted. So not all abolitionists lived up to a perfect ideal of racial equality, a fact that some historians have emphasized. Goodman puts the emphasis where it belongs, on the unprecedented pursuit of racial brotherhood as the reason for abolishing slavery.
Why did only a minority of evangelicals think this way? Why didn't all Christians see the logic of the abolitionist crusade? This question is finally unanswerable—why do children raised in good families sometimes turn out bad?—but Goodman puts it into the context of the "market revolution" of the early nineteenth century. America, particularly Yankee America, was changing rapidly from a bucolic, parochial society to an industrial one. New classes of entrepreneurs and "business-men" were replacing traditional authorities. Acquisition and luxury were idealized as success. (Before, wisdom and moderation were revered.) Abolitionists tended to come from those who were most deeply disturbed by this revolution, feeling that America was creating a demoralized, careless, aristocratic, material, and greedy society. (These were the very qualities they also perceived in southern slaveholders.) As they searched for a new moral order to replace the obviously tottering old one, Christian ideals of brotherhood and racial equality stood out more clearly. It was a small leap to find in abolition the commitment to ideals worth living for.
Tim Stafford is senior writer for CHRISTIANITY TODAY. His novel on the abolitionist movement, The Stamp of Glory, is forthcoming in January 2000 from Thomas Nelson.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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