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Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865-1909

Online ISBN:
9781531507961
Print ISBN:
9781531505592
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865-1909

Raymond James Krohn
Raymond James Krohn
Boise State University
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Published online:
23 May 2024
Published in print:
3 October 2023
Online ISBN:
9781531507961
Print ISBN:
9781531505592
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

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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