The long saga of slavery and its abolition is one of the best studied and most disputed subjects in American history. But one wonders how important the abolition movement was in bringing slavery to an end. To explore that, I feel a great need for some context before we discuss the work in hand – in particular an examination of what the historians have said about it. For Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, writing in American Negro Slavery (1918), slavery was a much needed “civilising” force for black people. It offered them good conditions, necessary social controls and a broadly constructive relationship with whites. But it was an economic failure and headed for collapse even without abolition. As a southerner (born in 1877 of a plantation mother), Phillips’ bias comes as no surprise. Ellis Merton Coulter writing in the 1950s was a frank apologist for the unreconstructed south: for secession, segregation and the whole apparatus of Jim Crow. Neither saw the abolitionists as a force for good.
Eric Williams, the West Indian professor and politician, in his Capitalism & Slavery, 1944, insisted against Phillips that slavery was never remotely “constructive”, merely exploitative. But he agreed with him that in the end, it was an unprofitable failure and for that hard economic reason, it had to be stamped out. The abolitionist movement was just a spin-off. Williams’ interest of course was mainly in the British West Indies. Of post-war historians Eugene Genovese, still in his Marxist phase, Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974) modernised Williams’ view and highlighted the slave system as a form of cultural domination or “hegemony” – backed up by physical force. Such a system normalised the social relations through which wealth could be forcibly extracted from slaves. These attitudes persisted well beyond 1865 and abolitionism did little to uproot the idea of a racial hierarchy.
However, Fogel and Engermann in Time on the Cross (also 1974) refuse to “buy” the idea that slavery was a failed economic system – it remained profitable to the end, they wrote, a claim which was echoed by Seymour Drescher in his recent book, Abolition. Drescher did not agree that the slave plantations were unviable and therefore doomed, nor was he impressed by claims that they were undermined by the influence of Evangelical religion. Instead he stressed the new “moral order” of human relationships which capitalism ushered in. This underpinned the humanitarian campaign which was being conducted with such a passion on both sides of the Atlantic. But as we know, the brutal paternalism of slavery gave way to the free-market brutalism of the early industrial revolution. Be that as it may, modern historians seem to have found room at last to credit Garrison, Philips, Weld, the Grimkes and the Tappans with some responsibility for bringing the “Peculiar Institution” to an end.
We must distinguish between Abolitionists (who wanted to strike root and branch at the whole institution) and the Anti-Slavery people whose main concern was to stop it spreading. The outlook of this second group was not necessarily humanitarian at all: white settlers heading west did not want to face competition for land from southern seigneurs with a ready-made slave labour force nor, frequently, did they want blacks living next to them, slave or free. Humane feelings had nothing to do with it. Moreover, even in the northern states where slavery was a remote memory, there was plenty of hostility to black people and discrimination touched every facet of life. As David Potter wrote: “while slavery was sectional, Negrophobia was national”. Abolitionists were seen as dangerous fanatics, beaten up and, as in the case of Elijah Lovejoy, occasionally murdered. And just to make the puzzle more perplexing, a lot of the early abolitionist sentiment came from the south. It was a complicated picture.
I hope readers will forgive this long exordium before considering the book. Peter Hinks (private scholar) and John McKivigan (Purdue University, Indiana) have given us a useful but modest collection of articles on the movement against slavery. Their end-word “mosaic” is telling and reflects some of the intricacies I described above. McKivigan and Hinks did not write the entire work themselves: each article is signed but, unfortunately, the individual contributors are not listed. The body of the book is straightforward: a list of entries and then an introduction followed by a chronology. This covers a 400-year span going up to the year 1881. Then comes the main alphabetical sequence comprising around 140 entries, one-third of them biographies. The book rounds off with a dozen or so primary documents (40 pages), then a bibliography and index. Each article has a further reading list as well.
As the title indicates, the book deals with anti-slavery in the USA and most of the entries reflect that – but not all. Olaudah Equiano, who gets an entry, was an emancipated slave who wrote a famous memoir in 1789 but his connections were with Africa, Britain and the Caribbean, not America. Equiano lived in England on and off from 1767, but his freedom was assured after the famous Somersett case decided in the Court of King’s Bench in 1772 (also noticed here). William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull in Yorkshire, UK, is included on account of his great influence but not Thomas Clarkson or Granville Sharp, the two other great figures of the British movement. As for other biographies, we get a galaxy of famous names – John Quincy Adams, Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, Cassius Clay (the original), and of course the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Only three presidents are mentioned, although many of the Chief Executives from before the Civil War owned slaves.
The subject entries reveal the fissiparous nature of the movement: Garrison’s own vehicle, the American Anti-Slavery Society is noticed but also the Liberty Party’s American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonisation Society, neither of which Garrison wanted anything to do with. He did not want anti-slavery to enter party politics (some hope!) and had no time for the “back to Africa” views of the Colonisation Society. The entries include several celebrated court cases, notably the Amistad case of 1841, but incredibly, to find out about (Dred) Scott v. Sandford of 1857, you have to go to the index: there is no article.
The editors have obviously preferred slightly longer articles rather than producing a snappy reference book full of facts. This reduces the number of articles. Thus, the newspapers Liberator and Emancipator and Oberlin College (founded by abolitionists) fail to make the main sequence of articles but appear in the index. The Ordinance of 1787 makes neither. The most relevant religious group, the Quakers, receives pride of place, also the Congregationalists, but for Methodists and Baptists, you must again consult the index. Of the longer articles, Manumission (the individual granting of freedom by a slave owner) is awarded six pages: an extended treatment of a rare occurrence – slave owners did not lightly give away such a large capital investment.
As usual with short, selective reference works such as this, it is easy to pick out the omissions: no “gag rule”, no Free Soil Party, no Emancipation Proclamation and no Thirteenth Amendment (although both the last two are excerpted in the Documents section). To be fair, however, the encyclopaedia is not a work on slavery but on “Abolition & Anti-slavery”, and for that reason, its compass has been narrowed, cutting out much relevant material. The dozen or so documentary extracts are taken from newspapers, personal memoirs, legal and political documents and a novel. Navigating your way through the site is easy, although I never find e-books as handy to use as a printed book. I have not seen a bound copy so can offer no opinion on it.
Hinks and McKivigan have compiled a useful but rather hit-and-miss assemblage of articles which are good as far as they go. More preferable would have been a bigger, more studied and more detailed work which went beyond filling a publisher’s list and gave the reader an authoritative guide to stand the test of time. I began this review with a look at the historiography of abolitionism and anti-slavery. I feel this could also have been treated at some length in the encyclopaedia by specialists more knowledgeable than me. For that reason and many others, I would not give the book a thumbs-up. It is an indifferent piece of work.
