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The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861

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Stanley Harrold's well-written work is an important contribution to antislavery historiography. Taking to task those historians who see antislavery as primarily a movement to reform Northern society, Harrold demonstrates that Northern and Southern abolitionists were active in the South up until the Civil War. Furthermore, Harrold makes a convincing case that the very real abolitionist presence in the Upper South was a "precipitative cause of secession and the Civil War." For Harrold, the Southern response to the abolitionist threat was neither irrational or exaggerated. I commend Harrold's work to any student of antislavery or the antebellum South.

Years of revisions and the theories on education being dominated by government and puritans have concreted a world of myths around the War against the States that most of us are snared. Abraham Lincoln, not so much for the champion of emancipation (unless as a campaign slogan) but for his defeating of any rights of sovernity from the government, he is remembered like a Roman titan. Jefferson Davis is reduced to less than Lincoln's shadow.
Raceism as it exists all over our country today was just the same back then. And at one point or another the majority of Northern states groomed the instituion of slavery until more profits were to be had in the importation. (And many do not consider that banning of the international slave trade in the Southern states created one of the riffs that would iventually lead to war. Even so the North continued as merchants of flesh. Before the war in New Orleans Judah P. Benjamin who would later become a Jewish Confederate secretary of state lead a case defending a group of Africans that had revolted against their capturers on the high seas (no, not the Amisted). As the shipping company demanded full compistation and revenge, Juda Bnejamin exlaimed, " "What is a slave? He is a human being. He has feeling and passion and intellect. His heart, like the heart of the white man, swells with love, burns with jealousy, aches with sorrow, pines under restraint and discomfort, boils with revenge and ever cherishes the desire for liberty." He went on to say that they, like us, would conqure liberty of the chance presented itself.

This history has been buried in a brutal way. The Abolitionists & the South does not suggest that the majority of the population on both sides of the Potomac had old school rules of understanding their world. But for once it is not a side long page by page "concentrating on the mote in thy brother's eye rather than the beam in mine own" study we see so much in history telling. An industrial changing and growing North and the lazy, mean, fire breathing South. One story or another.

I think the student reading this work will also appreciate the variety of sources the author researched.