Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865-1909
Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865-1909
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Abstract
As the Civil War destabilized and permanently upended the southern system of slavery, the institution’s most fervent northern adversaries contemplated not just the existence of organizations like the American Anti-Slavery Society, but also what abolitionism itself formally entailed. Their reflections on a decades-long campaign to immediately emancipate the enslaved hardly abated once an amendment forever outlawing enslavement entered the U.S. Constitution in December 1865. This study explores the late-in-life ruminations of antislavery memorial and historical writers to gauge the stable and shifting meanings of antebellum abolitionism from the Era of Reconstruction to the Age of Jim Crow. By investigating veteran abolitionists as movement chroniclers and commemorators, and situating their texts within a variety of contexts, it further assesses the postbellum commitments of activists who had valued themselves as the slaves’ steadfast friends. Never solely against slavery, the antiracism ethos animating the immediate emancipation campaign equipped its adherents with the necessary linguistic resources to wage a bold, sustained philanthropic fight. Abolitionist Twilights consequently focuses on the ways in which the status and condition of the freedpeople and their descendants impacted book-length representations of antislavery persons and events. In the process of probing veteran-abolitionist engagement in or disengagement from an ongoing African American freedom struggle, this work ultimately problematizes scholarly understandings of abolitionism’s racial justice history and legacy.
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Front Matter
- Introduction: What Is Abolitionism Now? From the Disposition of the AASS to the Determinants of Abolitionist History
- 1 Antislavery Moderated: Samuel Joseph May and the Lessons of Respectable Reform
- 2 Antislavery Elevated: William Wells Brown and the Purpose of Black Activism
- 3 Antislavery Vindicated: Oliver Johnson and the Value of Abolitionism’s Grand Old Party
- 4 Antislavery Sanctified: Parker Pillsbury and the Spirit of Abolitionism in the Fields
- 5 A Tale of Two Slaveries: Aaron Macy Powell and the Transfiguration of Abolitionism
- 6 Songs of Innocence and Experience: Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the Abdication of Abolitionism
- 7 What Was Antislavery For? From the Disbandment of the AASS to the Determination of Abolitionist Women
- Coda: Complicated Legacies
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End Matter
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