Antislavery fractures: the debates between Garrisonians and black abolitionists on voting, the Constitution, and the Bible
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Abstract
This dissertation traces the changing religious and political beliefs of the Garrisonians, arguing that their rejection of the Christian republican consensus, first in favor of perfectionism, then freethought, split the abolitionist movement in general and alienated black abolitionists in particular. When the Garrisonians split the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) in 1840 to uphold their perfectionist belief that voting was sinful, most black abolitionists left the AASS to continue agitating for black voting rights. In the following years, while the Garrisonians were arguing that the antislavery politics were futile and that the Constitution was irredeemably proslavery, most black abolitionists joined the Liberty Party and put forward antislavery readings of the Constitution that guaranteed citizenship rights irrespective of color. As the Garrisonians adopted freethought and concluded that the Bible was proslavery, black abolitionists overwhelmingly continued to argue that the Bible condemned American race-based, chattel slavery and many even advocated for circulating Bibles among slave populations in the hope that it would inspire them to pursue freedom. Unable to work within the dominant discourses of their time and place, the Garrisonians dwindled in numbers and influence throughout the 1840s and 50s, becoming complicit in their own marginalization – from northern society and from the majority of abolitionists, black and white, who accepted political action and orthodox religion. Conversely, black abolitionists, eventually including the once-Garrisonian Frederick Douglass, were able to appropriate the regnant Christian republicanism of antebellum America and deploy arguments from the Constitution and the Bible against slavery and racism. Black abolitionists thus built mainstream coalitions and help to lay the intellectual groundwork for the political antislavery movement that ultimately captured the White House and enabled emancipation during the Civil War. While recent historians have de-emphasized divisions within the abolitionist movement, this dissertation intervenes in the field by arguing that one must emphasize the 1840 schism in order to account fully for black abolitionists’ interpretations of and contributions to the antislavery movement. In order to give an account of abolitionism as a successful, black-driven movement, one must decenter the Garrisonians from the narrative of antebellum abolitionism and regard them primarily as an off-shoot perfectionist religious sect. Paradoxically, to decenter them, one must first develop this alternate account of the Garrisonians, as to treat the Garrisonians as the main, or even equal, participants in the abolition movement after 1840 is to reinscribe their paternalistic racism in the historical narrative. The story of free northern black Americans fighting for their political rights and the story of abolition ultimately form one long, continuous arc.
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2024