and comprehensive plans for making that
vision a reality. Otherwise, we cede the
policy ground to thinkers like Wright and
institutions like Brookings and ensure that
the American empire continues to hum
along unchallenged.
Daniel Bessner is the Anne H.H. and Kenneth
B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the Henry M. Jackson School
of International Studies at the University of
Washington.
The Black Roots of Abolition
Christine Mathias
D I S S E N T · FA L L 2 0 1 7
The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition
by Manisha Sinha
Yale University Press, 2016, 784 pp.
The twin themes of slavery and freedom
are having a moment. In recent years,
moviegoers have embraced serious films
like 12 Years a Slave (2013); Beyoncé’s latest album, Lemonade (2016), intersperses
visual references to slavery with images
from the present; and two recent bestselling novels—Colson Whitehead’s The
Underground Railroad (2016) and Ben Winters’s Underground Airlines (2016)—offer
gripping narratives about fugitive slaves
and their pursuers. The Smithsonian’s
National Museum of African American History and Culture finally opened in 2016,
and historical figures who were previously
commemorated primarily during Black History Month have now become subjects of
perennial interest. Two members of Congress have crossed party lines to propose
a commission honoring the bicentennial of
the birth of the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In Dorchester, Maryland,
the recently inaugurated Harriet Tubman
Underground Railroad Visitor Center celebrates the life of the famed abolitionist and
(pending Trump administration approval)
future face of the $20 bill.
Douglass and Tubman are justly
regarded as national heroes. Over time,
they have become representatives for
the greatest social movement in U.S. history: the long struggle to abolish slavery.
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Manisha Sinha, a professor of history at the
University of Connecticut, has written an
encyclopedic account of this struggle, aptly
titled The Slave’s Cause. Abolitionism is
often depicted as an ineffectual campaign
led by bourgeois liberals, teetotalers, and
“perpetual naysayers,” but Sinha argues
that it was actually a radical, interracial
movement. Most importantly, she shows
that slaves’ resistance galvanized abolitionists, rather than the other way around. The
book celebrates the black men and women
who pushed their country to live up to its
ideals, and subtly encourages readers to
finish what the abolitionists started.
Borrowing from the language of feminism, Sinha divides her account into two
waves: the first stretching from the Age
of Revolutions through the 1820s, and the
second from the late 1820s through the
Civil War. She provides one example after
another of black abolitionists shaping the
movement and inspiring white allies. As
early as the 1790s, black churches and
societies developed pioneering critiques of
slavery in petitions to Congress. Attempted
slave rebellions radicalized activists. Black
abolitionists in Baltimore helped persuade William Lloyd Garrison to demand
immediate abolition and oppose efforts to
resettle black Americans in Liberia. Black
subscribers provided financial support for
Garrison’s influential abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, and their speeches
and letters filled its pages. In the 1830s
and 1840s, Hosea Easton and James Pennington, both black intellectuals and ministers, wrote groundbreaking treatises on
U.S. racism.
Free black communities played essential roles in facilitating the Underground
Railroad, and former slaves like Pennington and Douglass became some of the
movement’s most persuasive writers and
speakers. They combined astute political
commentary with observations based
on their own experiences. “My back is
scarred by the lash—that I could show you.
I would I could make visible the wounds of
this system upon my soul,” Douglass told
a crowd in Boston. Henry “Box” Brown
moved audiences by showing how he had
been shipped north in a box. Women who
had escaped slavery, especially Harriet
REVIEWS
Johnson, William H. (1901–1970) © Copyright. “Underground Railroad, ca. 1945. Photo
Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. / Art Resource, NY.
Jacobs, exposed slavery’s patriarchal
underpinnings with scathing accounts of
physical and sexual abuse.
Some abolitionist histories are heartbreaking. In 1856, an enslaved woman
named Margaret Garner fled with her
family from Kentucky. When officials
tracked them down in her uncle’s cabin
in Ohio, her husband Robert opened fire,
and Margaret slit her two-year-old daughter’s throat. In court, she testified that she
would rather kill her children than send
them back to slavery. The Garners were reenslaved, provoking an uproar among abolitionists, and, more than a century later,
inspiring Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Margaret
herself died of typhoid, but her husband
lived to fight alongside many other black
men in the Union army. They helped realize
a prophecy made by fellow abolitionist
John Brown, that “the crimes of this guilty
land will never be purged away but with
blood.”
As in any social movement, abolitionists frequently disagreed with one another.
Sinha contends that religious and political
cleavages were often more meaningful
than racial ones, and she urges readers to
judge white abolitionists not by contemporary standards but “through the eyes
of the enslaved and the newly free.” Early
abolitionist societies had no black members and espoused paternalist ideas about
“racial uplift,” but Sinha shows that black
leaders at the time appreciated their white
allies. Nonetheless, interracial cooperation exposed black abolitionists to patently
racist treatment. Douglass wrote frankly in
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D I S S E N T · FA L L 2 0 1 7
My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) of how
some white colleagues had wronged him.
“I was generally introduced as a ‘chattel’—
a ‘thing’—a piece of southern ‘property’—
the chairman assuring the audience that
it could speak.” Douglass proved that he
could speak magnificently, but received
only about half the fees normally paid to
white abolitionist lecturers.
Despite widespread racism, black
men and women did as much to defeat
slavery as white abolitionists like William
Lloyd Garrison and John Brown, or even
Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War,
black soldiers and activists convinced
Lincoln to support immediate emancipation and black citizenship. They rejoiced
in 1863 when Lincoln officially freed more
than three million slaves with a stroke of
his pen, but they knew the fight would not
end there. Douglass greeted the news of
emancipation with a favorite maxim: “The
price of Liberty is eternal vigilance . . .
Slavery has existed in this country too long
and has stamped its character too deeply
and indelibly, to be blotted out in a day or a
year, or even in a generation.”
Slavery in the United States is often
remembered as a “peculiar institution,”
but in fact, slavery and freedom developed in tandem across the Atlantic world.
It’s worth keeping in mind that, of the millions of Africans who were transported
against their will to the Americas, only
about 5 percent were taken to what is now
U.S. territory. Sinha emphasizes some of
abolition’s international dimensions, and
rightly points out that abolitionists were
inspired by Haiti, the only nation in the
world formed through a successful slave
rebellion, but her account understandably
focuses on the United States. In most of
the Caribbean and Latin America, slavery
was abolished through more gradual and
legalistic means, but the actions of slaves
and free people of African descent were
crucial there too.
By some measures, the most committed slave societies in the nineteenth
century were Brazil and Cuba. Precise statistics are hard to come by, but Brazil and
the United States probably had similarly
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sized slave populations of about one million around 1810, while Cuba’s numbered
nearly 200,000. Brazil imported as many
as two million slaves over the course of the
nineteenth century, and Cuba more than
600,000. Neither had as large a slave population as the United States’ at its peak in
1860, in part because slaves tended to live
shorter lives on Brazilian and Cuban plantations. (This difference in life expectancy
had nothing to do with how slaves were
treated; rather, slaves in Latin America,
especially those born in Africa, were more
likely to die of tropical diseases.)
In both Brazil and Cuba, the U.S. Civil
War stoked fears of slave revolts and
antislavery sentiment, but forms of legal
enslavement persisted into the 1880s.
Brazil had its own multi-racial abolitionist
mass movement, led in part by mixed-race
activists, and many slaves there escaped
or purchased their own freedom. In Cuba,
a multiracial army fought multiple wars
for independence from Spain and against
slavery. Slaves fled plantations to join
insurgent forces, and antiracist rhetoric
flourished on the island until the United
States invaded in 1898. Across the Americas, abolition was in part “the slave’s
cause.”
In their rhetoric and their tactics,
abolitionists provided a model for subsequent grassroots movements. In the
United States, the most direct link is to
first wave feminism. The women’s suffrage movement grew up alongside antislavery sentiment, before parting ways
over the Fourteenth Amendment, which
extended voting rights to black men. After
the Civil War, white women applied the
lessons of abolitionism to fight for their
own rights, even as they embraced racism
and betrayed their black allies. (Susan B.
Anthony allegedly declared that she would
rather cut off her right hand than lobby
for the vote for black men before white
women.)
Black women regularly confronted
racism and sexism, and they persisted in
using abolitionist tactics to fight for the
rights of women and former slaves. Shortly
after the end of the Civil War, a train conductor ordered Harriet Tubman to move
into the smoking car. When she refused,
as equals, and they fought for a country
that has tended to forget their sacrifices.
Sinha’s impeccably researched account
offers plenty to ponder, with nearly 600
pages of text and more than a hundred
pages of notes. Ultimately, the volume’s
heft reminds us that successful resistance
depends partly on numbers: bodies on the
ground and, sometimes, the slow passage
of time.
Christine Mathias is a lecturer in Modern
Latin American History at King’s College
London.
REVIEWS
the conductor forcibly ejected her, injuring
her arm in the process. Tubman’s story
inspired another black abolitionist, Frances
Ellen Watkins Harper, to deliver a searing
speech at the National Women’s Rights
Convention in 1866. Harper was frustrated
by white women who refused to recognize
the double bind that black women faced.
“You white women speak here of rights,”
she observed. “I speak of wrongs. . . . If
there is any class of people who need to be
lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.”
Nineteenth-century abolitionists did
not eradicate racism or sexism, but they
left behind promising recipes for interracial
cooperation. In a fleeting epilogue, Sinha
points out that abolitionist words and
deeds have inspired activists and leaders
of varying political persuasions, including
W. E. B. Du Bois, Eugene Debs, and Barack
Obama. Recently, abolitionist rhetoric has
cropped up in debates about mass incarceration, police brutality, and even climate change. As Alicia Garza, one of the
founders of Black Lives Matter, explained
in an interview with the Nation in 2015,
“What we are dealing with right now is a
disease that has plagued America since its
inception . . . the institution of policing is
rooted in the legacy of catching slaves.”
For readers struggling to respond to
the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner,
Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray,
and too many others, or to Trump’s travel
ban and his troubling response to white
supremacist violence in Charlottesville, The Slave’s Cause makes for timely
reading. The book’s implication is clear:
those who wish to curb the excesses of
capitalism and defend human rights could
learn something from these nineteenthcentury examples. This optimistic vision
echoes an older generation of historians,
writing during the Civil Rights era of the
1960s, who described abolitionists as an
“antislavery vanguard.”
The history of abolition highlights
the promises and the perils of interracial
activism, and we must remember both if
we seek to improve on the abolitionists’
legacy. Nineteenth-century black activists made indispensible contributions to a
movement that did not always value them
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