The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha Elizabeth R. Varon (bio) The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. By Manisha Sinha. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. 768. Cloth, $37.50.) Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause is a tour de force: a timely analytical synthesis of modern scholarship on abolitionism, full of bracing insights [End Page 130] and correctives. The nearly six hundred pages of detailed text provide a chronological overview of the antislavery struggle, with the opening section of the book covering the movement’s eighteenth-century “first wave” and early republic transition period, and the bulk of the book analyzing antebellum “second wave” immediatism. Sinha’s focus is on the centrality of African Americans to the movement, and particularly on their ideas: methodologically, this is an intellectual history at heart, a lucid genealogy of abolitionist thought. Sinha is careful at every turn both to provide state-of-the-art portraits of familiar thinkers such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and to bring less well known figures, such as William Watkins, James Pennington, and Sarah Parker Remond, to the fore. She shows that such activists deserve credit for establishing and sustaining a black protest tradition that was the foundation of what scholars have called, misleadingly, “Garrisonian” immediatism. Watkins, a leading Baltimore reformer, offered up a pioneering critique of African colonization that William Lloyd Garrison reprised. James W. C. Pennington of Brooklyn formulated the “covenant with death and agreement with hell” critique of the Constitution that Garrison would echo. Remond, an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, worked to internationalize the antislavery movement through an 1858 lecture tour in Britain attended by thousands of listeners. These and many other reformers, in speeches, petitions, resolutions, poems, novels, editorials, and autobiographies, “developed a concerted intellectual response to American racism” (311). Sinha’s book is unabashedly revisionist, as she frequently takes aim at what she characterizes as the conventional wisdom among historians. To those who attribute the “first emancipation” in the North to a waning economic interest in slavery, Sinha responds that black activism, exemplified by the freedom suits of men and women determined to use the legal system as an instrument of liberation, was the true driving force behind slavery’s demise in the North. To those who argue that the antislavery movement entered a doldrums in the early nineteenth century, Sinha responds that organizations such as the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race—which combated kidnapping, promoted black education, and tracked the progress of global antislavery—bridged the gap between first-wave and second-wave abolitionism. To those who argue that abolitionists were bourgeois lackeys of the emerging capitalist order, Sinha responds that the movement’s rank and file was drawn from the laboring classes, not the comfortable middle class; that abolitionism allied itself with workers’ causes such as the ten-hour-day movement, and with socialist communitarian experiments; and that abolitionists emphasized the capitalist nature [End Page 131] of slavery and the collusion of slaveholding and mercantilist elites. Most important, rather than emphasizing abolitionism’s role in inspiring slave resistance and rebellion, as recent scholarship has done, Sinha reverses the equation: slave resistance and rebellion, she argues persuasively, inspired abolitionist activism. In their acts of rebellion, on land and on sea, and in their waves of flight through elaborate networks reaching into Canada, slaves demonstrated not only an “elemental” yearning for liberty but also a “cosmopolitan political sophistication” and knowledge of the “international geopolitics of slavery and freedom” (412). Rather than sharply contrasting the movement’s phases, Sinha emphasizes continuity. To recognize the centrality of African Americans to the antislavery movement, she shows, is to recognize that abolitionism was at every turn radical: black abolitionists demanded freedom “not simply as an act of mercy or benevolence but as acts of justice and retribution” (144). Sinha chronicles the divisions within the movement (over issues such as emigration) and traces the emergence of free-soil political parties. In her account of the fugitive slave controversies of the 1850s and of John Brown’s raid, she demonstrates how the...