The Aims and Impact of Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1840-1860

Abstract

The Aims and Impact of Carrisonian Abolitionism, 1840-1860 James B. Stewart Historians generally have held that after 1840 Garrisonian abolitionists contributed little to the sectional conflict. This interpretation, simple and blunt, pictures Utopian, unrealistic William Lloyd Garrison presiding over a truncated version of the American Anti-Slavery Society bereft of members and lacking funds. Many of abolitionism's most talented operatives, put off by the Garrisonian insistence on overthrowing the government, non-resistance and women's rights, had deserted the Society in 1840 for direct political involvement, the Liberty party. After that date, according to most scholars, the American Anti-Slavery Society claimed the allegiance of only a few itinerant agitators , who assailed a hostile public with bitter attacks on all political parties, while broadcasting Garrison's anarchic doctrine of northern disunion. "Misled by Garrison's antipolitical point of view," one historian has concluded, radical abolitionists "failed ... to appreciate the contribution of political friction to the growth of antislavery sentiment ."1 In general, students of the antislavery movement have agreed with Gilbert Hobbes Barnes' contention that the radicals were 'dead weights' who had an "even less negligible" effect upon sectional events during the 1840's and 185tfs.2 Recently, however, certain scholars have cast some general doubt upon the foregoing interpretation. Several historians have charted some of the general crosscurrents between Garrisonian radicalism and political events, arguing that pure moral agitation and pragmatic political developments must not be rigidly separated.3 A re-examination of the 1840's and 1850's suggests that the Garrisonian approach to northern politics was not nearly as unsophisticated and unproductive as historians have assumed. To best understand these matters, one must return to 1840. In that 1 Richard Hofstadter, "Wendell Phillips: The Patrician as Agitator" in The American Political Tradition and The Men Who Made It (New York, 1948), p. 149. 2 Gilbert Hobbes Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse (Washington, 1933), p. 175. 3 See especially Howard Zinn, "Abolitionists, Freedom Riders and the Tactics of Agitation" in Martin Duberman (ed.), The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, 1965), pp. 417-451; Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860 (New York, I960); Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and his Critics on Strategy and Tactics (New York, 1969). 197 198CIVIL WAR history year a large minority departed the American Anti-Slavery Society. They disavowed the traditional program of moral suasion as well as Garrison's new, "heretical" doctrines, and plunged into politics by establishing the Liberty party. The violent recriminations that ensued between members of the "old" and "new" organizations reflected poorly on both sides and did much to convince historians of the Garrisonians' "antipohtical" bias. In attacking the Liberty party experiment, the Garrisonians proceeded from the well-founded assumption, validated by twentieth-century scholarship, that all of American society was uniformly hostile to the cause of the slave.4 The very structure of the American government, the Constitution, reflected this verity in its many proslavery compromises .5 So did the Garrisonians' own experiences. Congress, they argued , had simply responded to the dominant opinions of the nation by legislating the censorship of abolitionist literature from the southern maü, and by refusing to consider antislavery petitions in the House of Representatives. "Non-resistants declare that, of all questions which now agitate the land, none can compare in importance, politically, with that of slavery," Garrison exclaimed in 1839. "Do the politicians agree with them? No!"8 How could the Liberty party expect "to make an anti-slavery Congress out of pro-slavery materials?" queried Henry C. Wright. "The nation must be abolitionized, before an abolition Congress can be created. . . . Why not then, lend all their energies to abolitionize the nation [?] Then of necessity, the fruit will appear in an anti -slavery Congress and government."7 Implicit in Wright's statement are the assumptions of an effective pressure group member, as well as the dreams of a perfectionist. He affirmed his faith in the malleability of public opinion and stated that elected officials react positively to public pressure. In short, Wright articulated his basic belief that the democratic process would respond at all levels to the Garrisonians' special interest, emancipation of the...