Piloting the car of human freedom: Abolitionism, woman suffrage, and the problem of radical reform, 1860--1870.

摘要

Focusing on a corps of white abolitionists who had long demanded full equality of rights for black Americans, this dissertation traces their responses to the unfolding of emancipation through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Due to a number of factors, including their own shaping of the source base, white Garrisonians have remained symbols of a kind of professedly disinterested "radicalism" still reflexively idealized in narratives of U.S. history. While several studies have questioned this group's idealism and their centrality to the antislavery movement, hardly any examine them through the war and emancipation; hence few studies allow for their having been affected by the unfolding of events. This dissertation posits that only by critically evaluating how this group reacted to the realization of their main goal can we adequately assess their historical significance, and some of the reasons for the sudden collapse of "radical" Reconstruction policies. The study finds marked qualification in and division over their demands for social change, even as they kept insisting their goals had not changed at all and their differences were not significant. The dissertation considers four shifts in the stance or ground held by white Garrisonian abolitionists. The first is from opposition to the federal government because it recognized and upheld slavery to support for that government upon the outbreak of the war, even while it continued to uphold slavery. The second shift moved abolitionists from an avowed nonpartisanship regarded elected representatives to active promotion of the candidacies of Lincoln and Fremont respectively in the presidential election of 1864. A third shift was from the view that freedmen's aid is not abolitionists' special work but rather common charity to the view that it is the proper and logical evolution of abolitionism. In a fourth shift, reformers advocating extension of equal rights evolved from a coalition emphasizing the harmony of rights to multiple constituencies not only separate and independent, but antagonistic as well. The study sheds new light on activists' relationship with state power and the gradual, piecemeal extension of equal rights, as well as on how self-described radicals regarded the retreat from a "radical" reconstruction.