The abolitionist movement was based upon a moral frenzy, not an economic discontent. After about 1830 almost all abolitionists were resident in the North. For the most part they were middle-class people who had no material stake in the conservation or destruction of the slave system, which was in the most literal sense none of their business. Since slavery was a moral rather than an economic injury to them, they came to look upon it as an economic institution but as a breach of the ordinations of God. Abolitionism was a religious movement, emerging from the ferment of evangelical Protestantism, psychologically akin to other reforms - women's rights, temperance, and pacifism - which agitated the spirits of the Northern middle classes during the three decades before the Civil War. Its philosophy was essentially a theology, its technique similar to the techniques of revivalism, its agencies the church congregations of the towns. "Our enterprise," declared Wendell Phillips, "is eminently a religious one, dependent for success entirely on the religious sentiment of the people." The conviction that SLAVERY IS A SIN is the Gibraltar of the cause." Theodore Weld, one of the most effective leaders of the Western wing of the movement, once wrote:
In discussing the subject of slavery, I have always presented it as pre-eminently a moral question,
arresting the conscience of the nation. . . .As a question of politics and national economy, I have
passed it with scarce a look or a word, believing that the business of the abolitionists is with the
heart of the nation, rather than with its purse strings."
They had, to be sure, originally planned to make their campaign an appeal to the conscience of the slave-owners themselves, but sober observation of the Southern minds soon showed the hopelessness of such an effort. The minds of the masters were closed, and the abolitionists had precious little access to the minds of the slaves - nor did they want to incite insurrection.
.................................................................................................................................................Other abolitionists, feeling that it would be impossible to make a quick jump from slavery into freedom, and realizing that slavery in the United States was not legally a national but a state institution, which might be dropped in one place while it was flourishing in another, played with the metaphysics of "immediatism" by calling for "immediate emancipation which is gradually accomplished." Gradual methods, in short, should be immediately begun. Thus James Thome receded from the high ground of the Garrisonians: "We did not wish (the slaves) turned loose, nor even to be governed by the same Code of Laws which are adapted to intelligent citizens." To Garrison's followers this sounded like a proposal to leave the Negroes in some kind of subject condition, like a plan for forced labor --"the substitution of one type of slavery for another."
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The abolitionists were even less clear on how the Negro was to become an independent human being after he was freed (188). Southern proslavery apologists were quick to seize upon this weakness of the abolition case; they grasped all too well the anticipated difficulties of emancipation, and expounded them with the tenacity of the obsessed. Lincoln, who struggled conscientiously to imagine what could be done about slavery, confessed sadly that even if he had full power to dispose of it he would not know how. The abolitionists likewise did not know, but THEY DID NOT KNOW THAT THEY DID NOT KNOW (caps mine-jnr :-) The result was that when formal freedom did finally come to the Negro, many abolitionists failed entirely to realize how much more help he would need or what form it should take. Wendell Phillips, however, had learned to transcend Garrison thought. In the critical hour of Reconstruction he dropped the veil of dogma and turned to the realities.
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*Excerpts taken from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, by Richard Hofstadter, pp.185-188
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