United States

Finally and fatally there was abolitionism, the antislavery movement. Passionately advocated and resisted with equal intensity, it appeared as late as the 1850s to be a failure in politics. Yet by 1865 it had succeeded in embedding its goal in the Constitution by amendment, though at the cost of a civil war. At its core lay the issue of “race,” over which Americans have shown their best and worst faces for more than three centuries. When it became entangled in this period with the dynamics of American sectional conflict, its full explosive potential was released. If the reform impulse was a common one uniting the American people in the mid-19th century, its manifestation in abolitionism finally split them apart for four bloody years

William Lloyd Garrison.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Lydia M. Child at age 22.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Abolition itself was a diverse phenomenon. At one end of its spectrum was William Lloyd Garrison, an “immediatist,” who denounced not only slavery but the Constitution of the United States for tolerating the evil. His newspaper, The Liberator, lived up to its promise that it would not equivocate in its war against slavery. Garrison’s uncompromising tone infuriated not only the South but many Northerners as well and was long treated as though it were typical of abolitionism in general. Actually it was not. At the other end of the abolitionist spectrum and in between stood such men and women as Theodore Weld, James Gillespie Birney, Gerrit Smith, Theodore Parker, Julia Ward Howe, Lewis Tappan, Salmon P. Chase, and Lydia Maria Child, all of whom represented a variety of stances, all more conciliatory than Garrison’s. James Russell Lowell, whose emotional balance was cited by a biographer as proof that abolitionists need not have been unstable, urged in contrast to Garrison that “the world must be healed by degrees.” Also of importance was the work of free blacks such as David Walker and Robert Forten and ex-slaves such as Frederick Douglass, who had the clearest of all reasons to work for the cause but who shared some broader humanitarian motives with their white coworkers.

Whether they were Garrisonians or not, abolitionist leaders have been scorned as cranks who were either working out their own personal maladjustments or as people using the slavery issue to restore a status that as an alleged New England elite they feared they were losing. The truth may be simpler. Few neurotics and few members of the northern socioeconomic elite became abolitionists. For all the movement’s zeal and propagandistic successes, it was bitterly resented by many Northerners, and the masses of free whites were indifferent to its message. In the 1830s urban mobs, typically led by “gentlemen of property and standing,” stormed abolitionist meetings, wreaking violence on the property and persons of African Americans and their white sympathizers, evidently indifferent to the niceties distinguishing one abolitionist theorist from another. The fact that abolition leaders were remarkably similar in their New England backgrounds, their Calvinist self-righteousness, their high social status, and the relative excellence of their educations is hardly evidence that their cause was either snobbish or elitist. Ordinary citizens were more inclined to loathe African Americans and to preoccupy themselves with personal advance within the system.

Support of reform movements

The existence of many reform movements did not mean that a vast number of Americans supported them. Abolition did poorly at the polls. Some reforms were more popular than others, but by and large none of the major movements had mass followings. The evidence indicates that few persons actually participated in these activities. Utopian communities such as Brook Farm and those in New Harmony, Indiana, and Oneida, New York, did not succeed in winning over many followers or in inspiring many other groups to imitate their example. The importance of these and the other movements derived neither from their size nor from their achievements. Reform reflected the sensitivity of a small number of persons to imperfections in American life. In a sense, the reformers were “voices of conscience,” reminding their materialistic fellow citizens that the American Dream was not yet a reality, pointing to the gulf between the ideal and the actuality.

Recruit arriving at the utopian community in Oneida, N.Y.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Religious-inspired reform