Theodore Foster: A Liberty Party Abolitionist Confronts the Civil War and Emancipation

Abstract

Many writers of antislavery and abolitionism have viewed their subjects through the lens of progress. Theodore Foster’s trajectory calls that schema into question. Active in abolitionism’s origins in Michigan, Foster served as a Liberty Party editor for the Ann Arbor Signal of Liberty during the 1840s. There, he created an extensive literary record that condemned slavery and championed African American rights. Almost sixteen years after leaving the Signal, Foster began editing the Lansing State Republican in 1863. Numbering among the radicals in the Republican Party, Foster remained committed to ending slavery. By the Civil War, though, he had developed an antipathy toward abolitionists. Further, Foster now used racist language that never appeared in the Signal of Liberty, openly accepted Black inferiority, and doubted whether emancipated people stood prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship. This evolution in Foster’s thinking should cause us to reexamine white abolitionists’ long-term commitments to racial equality, to reevaluate the distinctions between abolitionism and the Republican Party’s antislavery message, and to recognize that abolitionists could be more easily transformed than the society they hoped to change.