Kindling Backfires: Cultivating a National Antislavery Movement, 1836–1838

Abstract

‘Kindling Backfires’ introduces the reader to a cohort of 70 white abolitionists who could be counted as members of the upwardly mobile, evangelical middle class in the USA of the 1830s. Instead of beginning in 1816 with the rise of the American Colonization Society and other voluntary reform associations, this study focuses on the roughly two-year period of greatest coordinated effort by 70 abolitionist agents to craft a national antislavery movement, 1836–1838. This brief period coincided with the largest expansion in numbers of local societies and enrollment of new members achieved by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS). The limited role of women as agents – and their essential role as the most active of recruits – also receives study. Finally, the myriad forms of opposition to the agency, from rowdy mobs to sexual scandal to national economic recession are plumbed as their cumulative effect compelled the AA-SS to discontinue most of their agents' commissions in late 1837.