The Civil War at 150: Abolitionism!

Continuing with our ongoing series on the Civil War at 150, today we look to the subject of Abolitionism. Few movements in American political history have provoked such emotion and even outright violence, both from its own activities and the lesser known - and feverishly conspiratorial - retaliation it often provoked from slaveholders. Turning to the secession crisis itself, a credible case may be made that John Brown's raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal in 1859, perhaps more than any other single event, pushed the notoriously divisive political climate of the subsequent election to its breaking point. The American abolitionist movement is also something of a paradox relative to its British counterpart, where anti-slavery was affected first through judicial and subsequently parliamentary means. American abolitionism occupied a place at the center of the antebellum political debate, yet it never enjoyed much in the way of electoral success, the heated charges of the secessionists notwithstanding. Far more often, electoral opposition to slavery in the north manifested itself in the form of compromisers: territorial free soilers, free labor activists, and gradual emancipationists who generally opposed the institution of slavery, yet also frequently coupled their opposition with policy prescriptions falling far short of the abolitionists ideals. A single hard-line abolitionist - Gerrit Smith - won a seat in Congress in 1852 before resigning in disgust at the compromising tendencies of the nascent Free Soil Party, and longtime Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner occasionally flirted with the radical elements of the movement. Yet the mainstream of the Republican Party entertained compromise on the slavery issue far more often than its southern critics perceived, and in ways that also angered and infuriated abolition purists. Their position, as with much of the northern electorate, was chained to the territorial question rather than abolition-proper. In one such instance on the eve of the Civil War, Republicans including President-Elect Lincoln and New York Sen. William Seward even toyed with amending the Constitutionitself to protect slavery where it already existed, limiting the extent of their anti-slavery policy to opposing its territorial expansion as delineated by their 1860 platform. If not from the election then, where then did all the secession winter frenzy about abolitionism come from? In part, it was a heated and emotional reaction to recent events such as the Brown raid, as frequently happened in the wake of slave revolts, be they real or perceived. Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia in 1831 sparked an intense debate in the Virginia General Assembly that entertained both the Jeffersonian notions of gradual emancipation and a harsh retaliation against the uprising, ultimately settling for the latter and effectively driving the former from the mainstream of the Border State political dialogue (curiously, the violent suppression of the "Baptist War" uprising in Jamaica that same year had the opposite effect in Britain, prompting an inquiry in Parliament that emboldened the anti-slavery movement and resulted in the adoption of the Anti-Slavery Act of 1833). The intellectual wing of the American abolitionist movement was also famous for its own internal divisions, particularly after 1831. This had the dual effect of driving their intellectual debate in a radical - and radically liberal - direction, while also breeding a conspiratorial angle that their pro-slavery adversaries seized upon. Classical Liberal Abolitionism? While a collective "labor struggle" interpretation of slavery drives much of the modern historical discussion around the Civil War, the American abolitionist movement lends itself far more readily to intellectual individualism, untamed and radical at times but also thoroughly liberal in the classical sense. In fact, this individualist tendency was so pronounced that it enveloped the personal interactions of the movement's leading participants. The abolitionists were a notoriously schismatic bunch and generally eschewed "normal" channels of electoral participation. They operated on the political periphery and frequently obsessed upon philosophical minutiae within their own movement, looking inward to distinctions across the many abolition camps as often as they engaged the slavery adversary (the parallels to modern political libertarianism are too pronounced to pass by without noting). In 1839 the American Anti-Slavery Society (again modeled on the British anti-slavery movement, which had strong liberal inclinations) violently split over the issue of the U.S. Constitution, debating its validity on account of being a pro-slavery or anti-slavery document. William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips led the anti-Constitution camp, the former famously burning the document and renouncing attempts to politically engage what he saw as an inherently corrupted system of government. The breakaway pro-Constitution faction formed the Liberty Party in 1840 and fielded abolitionist candidates for president, albeit unsuccessfully, for the next decade. The aforementioned Gerrit Smith became its de facto leader, with Lysander Spooner (of later anarcho-individualist fame) and William Goodell providing the philosophical case for this position. Frederick Douglass later joined the pro-Constitution camp, promoting Spooner's pamphlet in his newspaper and adopting its argument in his famous "Fourth of July" speech from 1852. On both sides, this argument cut to the core question of government by consent. If the constituting document of a government sanctions the evil of slavery, so it follows, it violates consent and therefore voids its own legitimacy and that of the government it forms. If that document does not sanction the evil of slavery, then the continued existence of slavery under its watch is a violation of its own supreme law, that is to say unconstitutional. While it may strike some modern readers as a trite and pointless discussion, the constitutional sanction of slavery being uncritically assumed today, the leading abolitionists - Garrison and Smith, Phillips and Spooner, Emerson, Thoreau, and Goodell and Douglass - discussed and debated and fought about this subject with passion and intellectual fervor for nearly two decades before the Civil War. Whether they came down for or against the constitutional question, whether deeming as Garrison did a "pact with the devil" or as Douglass a "glorious liberty document," they also recognized their debate called into question the basic validity of the United States government and did so at a level far deeper than what is typically acknowledged in modern and simplistic pro-slavery interpretations of the document. In this too the question asked is a thoroughly liberal one, deriving, as Phillips acknowledged in his dissent and Spooner explicitly laid out in his affirmation of the Constitution, from Somersett's Case. This ruling of Lord Mansfield before the English Court of King's Bench in 1772 laid out the intellectual heart of the abolitionist debate over slavery, that being its relation to the very legitimacy of the state: "The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of now being introduced by Courts of Justice upon mere reasoning or inferences from any principles, natural or political; it must take its rise from positive law; the origin of it can in no country or age be traced back to any other source: immemorial usage preserves the memory of positive law long after all traces of the occasion; reason, authority, and time of its introduction are lost; and in a case so odious as the condition of slaves must be taken strictly, the power claimed by this return was never in use here; no master ever was allowed here to take a slave by force to be sold abroad because he had deserted from his service, or for any other reason whatever; we cannot say the cause set forth by this return is allowed or approved of by the laws of this kingdom, therefore the man must be discharged."