Neoabolitionist (or neo-abolitionist or new abolitionism) is a term used in
historiography
Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians ha ...
to characterize historians of
race relations
Race relations is a sociological concept that emerged in Chicago in connection with the work of sociologist Robert E. Park and the Chicago race riot of 1919. Race relations designates a paradigm or field in sociology and a legal concept in the ...
motivated by the spirit of
racial equality typified by the abolitionists who fought to abolish slavery in the mid-19th century. They write especially about
African-American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American ...
history,
slavery in the United States
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Sl ...
, the
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states th ...
and the
Reconstruction Era
The Reconstruction era was a period in American history following the American Civil War (1861–1865) and lasting until approximately the Compromise of 1877. During Reconstruction, attempts were made to rebuild the country after the bloo ...
.
As abolitionists had worked in the 19th century to end slavery and provide equal rights under the
US Constitution
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, in 1789. Originally comprising seven articles, it delineates the nation ...
to blacks, the new activists worked to enforce constitutional rights for all citizens and restore equality under the law for African Americans, including
suffrage
Suffrage, political franchise, or simply franchise, is the right to vote in representative democracy, public, political elections and referendums (although the term is sometimes used for any right to vote). In some languages, and occasionally i ...
and
civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals. They ensure one's entitlement to participate in the civil and political life of ...
.
In the late 20th century some historians emphasized the worlds of African Americans in their own words, in their own communities, to recognize them as agents, not victims. Publishing in the mid-1960s and through the 20th century, a new generation of historians began to revise traditional accounts of slavery in the United States, reconstruction,
racial segregation
Racial segregation is the systematic separation of people into race (human classification), racial or other Ethnicity, ethnic groups in daily life. Racial segregation can amount to the international crime of apartheid and a crimes against hum ...
and
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Other areas of the United States were affected by formal and informal policies of segregation as well, but many states outside the Sout ...
. Some major historians began to apply the term "neoabolitionist" to such historians, and some of this group identified as such.
Early 20th century: Dunning School
Many early 20th-century histories of the abolitionists and of the Reconstruction Era gave harsh assessments to the movement and the attempts by the federal government to force a transition in the South to a new social system. For instance, what was called the
Dunning School, an influential group of white historians led by
William Archibald Dunning
William Archibald Dunning (12 May 1857 – 25 August 1922) was an American historian and political scientist at Columbia University noted for his work on the Reconstruction era of the United States. He founded the informal Dunning School of inter ...
at
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
, assessed Reconstruction as marred by African-American participation, saying that all the state legislatures were dominated by freedmen, that they were incompetent to govern; that they had been misled by northern carpetbaggers; and that these governments of the postwar decades were unusually corrupt. This was the view expressed in ''
The Birth of a Nation
''The Birth of a Nation'', originally called ''The Clansman'', is a 1915 American silent epic drama film directed by D. W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish. The screenplay is adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.'s 1905 novel and play ''The Cla ...
'' (1915) and in
Claude G. Bowers
Claude Gernade Bowers (November 20, 1878 – January 21, 1958) was a newspaper columnist and editor, author of best-selling books on American history, Democratic Party politician, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambassador to Spain (1933†...
' best-selling ''The Tragic Era'' (1929).
In the 19th century after Reconstruction, former abolitionists, especially
African American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
s such as
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, February 1817 or 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became ...
, presented positive views of its achievements: gaining of
civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals. They ensure one's entitlement to participate in the civil and political life of ...
for African Americans, and expanded
suffrage
Suffrage, political franchise, or simply franchise, is the right to vote in representative democracy, public, political elections and referendums (although the term is sometimes used for any right to vote). In some languages, and occasionally i ...
to include poor whites. In the early 20th century,
Fisk University
Fisk University is a private historically black liberal arts college in Nashville, Tennessee. It was founded in 1866 and its campus is a historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1930, Fisk was the first Africa ...
historian
Alrutheus Ambush Taylor described the period of Reconstruction in
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...
and
Tennessee
Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...
in several books and articles.
W. E. B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ( ; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American-Ghanaian sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in ...
, a leading Marxist historian, published his ''Black Reconstruction in America'' in 1935, challenging the Dunning School. Du Bois stressed biracial cooperation and noted the achievements of biracial Reconstruction legislatures: establishment of public education in the South for the first time, founding of hospitals, asylums, and charitable institutions to improve general welfare. He said the higher taxes were needed to finance the new infrastructure.
New views of race and slavery
Beginning in the 1960s, historians writing about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, emphasized the human advancement achieved by the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of those who had been enslaved. Historians such as
James McPherson and
Martin Duberman admired the abolitionists and wrote studies of them. Through the later 20th century, such historians as David W. Blight,
Michael Les Benedict, James McPherson,
John Hope Franklin, and
Steven Hahn
Steven Howard Hahn (born 1951) is Professor of History at New York University.
Life
Hahn was born on July 18, 1951, in New York City. Educated at the University of Rochester, where he worked with Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman, Hahn receiv ...
marshalled documentation to reject the Dunning School notion that the Reconstruction era was overwhelmingly corrupt. They evaluated the postwar period as not more corrupt than many times of social change and turmoil in American history.
John Hope Franklin argued that Reconstruction had positive elements: most significantly, the
enfranchisement of African Americans, both those already free before the war and former slaves; the extension of citizenship and civil rights to four million African Americans; and the introduction of public schools throughout the South where such schools generally had not existed. Franklin, for example, points to the founding of
Howard
Howard is an English-language given name originating from Old French Huard (or Houard) from a Germanic source similar to Old High German ''*Hugihard'' "heart-brave", or ''*Hoh-ward'', literally "high defender; chief guardian". It is also probabl ...
and
Fisk,
historically black universities that educated generations, as two major successes of Reconstruction.
They went far beyond that in looking at slavery in detail, with changes in ideas about relations between masters and enslaved, and the various forms of resistance the latter used. The development of African-American communities, education and political culture has been intensively studied.
Historians argued that depriving African Americans of suffrage and civil rights, as was done in the South following Reconstruction, was itself a terrible form of corruption. They considered it a violation of the tenets of
representative government
Representative democracy, also known as indirect democracy, is a types of democracy, type of democracy where elected people Representation (politics), represent a group of people, in contrast to direct democracy. Nearly all modern liberal democr ...
, as African Americans had been effectively excluded from political participation and public life for decades.
In his 1988 book
Eric Foner dated the beginning of Reconstruction in 1863, emphasizing the significance of emancipation and the
Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the Civil War. The Proclamation changed the legal sta ...
. His title, ''Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877'' (1988), emphasized the "unfinished" theme in its subtitle, explicitly connecting Reconstruction to the
American Revolution
The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 1765 and 1791. The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revolut ...
, which had been based on ideas about human liberty and equality. His work suggested that Reconstruction had not completed the work of providing equality and rights to all American citizens, even after constitutional amendments to provide freedmen with citizenship. That work was continuing in the 20th century. His book was published after the civil rights movement gained federal legislation to enforce constitutional rights of suffrage and equal treatment under the law for African Americans and overturn state discrimination. Foner did not identify as a "neoabolitionist" in this work, nor did he refer to other historians by that term.
Usage history
* The newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (
NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E.&nb ...
) in 1910 called itself a "New Abolition Movement". Historian
W. E. B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ( ; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American-Ghanaian sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in ...
often used the term, as did newspapers in writing about the organization.
* In 1952,
Kenneth M. Stampp
Kenneth Milton Stampp (12 July 191210 July 2009), Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley (1946–1983), was a celebrated historian of slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstr ...
, discussing the new generation of revisionist historians of slavery (including himself), described them as "scholarly descendants of the northern abolitionists."
* In 1964, historian
George Tindall
George Brown Tindall (February 26, 1921 – December 2, 2006) was an American historian and author. A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1958 until his retirement, Tindall was "one of the nation's pre-eminent histo ...
said that in the 1920s, writer
H. L. Mencken was the "guiding genius" behind "the neoabolitionist myth of the Savage South." That is, Mencken was breaking with the "
Lost Cause" heroic image of the South and sharply criticizing it.
* In the early 1960s, says
Peter Novick
Peter Novick (July 26, 1934, Jersey City – February 17, 2012, Chicago) was an American historian who was Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He was best known for writing ''That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and t ...
, many historians dedicated to racial equality "were called 'neo-abolitionists'--a not unfriendly characterization, and one which many so-designated embraced."
*
Howard Zinn described
SNCC activists in the
Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, Racial discrimination ...
as the "new abolitionists" in the title of his
1964 book about the organization. Zinn did not use the term "neoabolitionist", nor did he apply the term to historians.
* In 1969,
Don E. Fehrenbacher
Don Edward Fehrenbacher (August 21, 1920 – December 13, 1997) was an American historian. He wrote on politics, slavery, and Abraham Lincoln. He won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for History for '' The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law ...
in the ''
American Historical Review'' discussed "today's neoabolitionist historians, whose own social roles often intensify their sense of identity with the antislavery radicals."
* In 1974,
C. Vann Woodward
Comer Vann Woodward (November 13, 1908 – December 17, 1999) was an American historian who focused primarily on the American South and race relations. He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A. Beard, stressing the influence of un ...
, a historian of the South, noted that, "by the 1950s a neoabolitionist mood prevailed among historians of slavery."
* In 1975,
James McPherson's book, ''Abolitionist Legacy,'' used "neo-abolitionist" more than 50 times to characterize 20th-century activists and historians.
* In 1986, historian Jack Temple Kirby wrote, "''Neo-abolitionist'' includes both popular and scholarly liberalism and black history in race relations imagery and scholarship, and a certain cynicism toward white southern elites."
*
Noel Ignatiev
Noel Ignatiev (; December 27, 1940 – November 9, 2019) was an American author and historian. He was best known for his theories on race and for his call to abolish " whiteness". Ignatiev was the co-founder of the New Abolitionist Society and c ...
and John Garvey use the term "new abolitionism" to refer to the "abolition of whiteness"; which is the cause the journal ''
Race Traitor'', which they coedit, is dedicated to.
*
David W. Blight
David William Blight (born 1949) is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previous ...
wrote in his book, ''Race and Reunion'' (2001):
::In the end this is a story of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture, how the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race. But the story does not merely dead-end in the bleakness of the age of segregation; so much of the emancipationist vision persisted in American culture during the early twentieth century, upheld by blacks and a fledgling neo-abolitionist tradition, that it never died a permanent death on the landscape of Civil War memory. That persistence made the revival of the emancipationist memory of the war and the transformation of American society possible in the last third of the twentieth century.
* In 2003, the conservative ''
National Review'' commented in 2003 "
is general perspective on the sectional conflict is already well represented by the Neoabolitionist school of Early American historians, and informs important works by scholars such as
Paul Finkelman
Paul Finkelman (born November 15, 1949) is an American legal historian, the Robert E. and Susan T. Rydell Visiting Professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, and a research affiliate at the Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre f ...
, Leonard Richards,
Donald Robinson, and William Wiecek
!--who wrote the quote? What article?-->
*According to historian Harvard Sitkoff in his 2001 article on books about African-American education, the term neoabolition or neo-abolitionist is sometimes considered derisive.
*
Michael Fellman
Michael Fellman (1943, Madison, Wisconsin – June 11, 2012, Vancouver, British Columbia) was a professor emeritus of history at
Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Fellman was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He was educ ...
in his 2006 book wrote:
::Starting in the late 1950s and continuing through the next decade, in tandem with the rise of the civil rights movement, many progressive historians reevaluated the abolitionists, even referring to the contemporary movement for change in America's perception of race as the "new abolitionism."
* Historian Christopher Metress in ''The American Historical Review'' in 2005 asserted, "the iconoclastic historian
Stanley M. Elkins reinterpreted the rebellious slave as a neoabolitionist fantasy."
* Fredrickson in 2008 wrote that "the most thorough and influential of the neo-abolitionist works of the 1960s was
James M. McPherson
James Munro McPherson (born October 11, 1936) is an American Civil War historian, and is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University. He received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for '' Battle Cry of F ...
''The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionist and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction'' (1964)." He notes that much neo-abolitionist historiography "clearly sides with the radicals against Lincoln", and that in later works, McPherson was more sympathetic to Lincoln.
*
Winthrop Jordan
Winthrop Donaldson Jordan (November 11, 1931 – February 23, 2007) was an American historian and professor who specialized in the history of slavery in the United States and racism against Black Americans. His 1968 work ''White Over Black: A ...
in his 2008 book on slavery and the South examines a contemporary group of "neo-abolitionist" historians who are "taking seriously again the critiques of black and white abolitionists."
* Zeus Leonardo wrote in 2009 the term had uses beyond historiography, saying, "Neo-abolitionist
pedagogy
Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as ...
suggests that teachers and students work together to name, reflect on, and dismantle discourses of
whiteness. It means disrupting white discourses and unsettling their codes."
*
Allen C. Guelzo (2009) notes that Lincoln's hesitation regarding emancipation, "has earned him the execration of every abolitionist and neo-abolitionist, from Garrison to (most recently) ''
Ebony'' editor
Lerone Bennett
Lerone Bennett Jr. (October 17, 1928 – February 14, 2018) was an African-American scholar, author and social historian who analyzed race relations in the United States. His works included ''Before the Mayflower'' (1962) and '' Forced into Glo ...
, whose book ''
Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream'' depicts Lincoln as a callous white racist, the kind of fence straddler 'we find in almost all situations of oppression or it.'"
*In his 2010 study of 20th-century American literature, David Seed classifies the novel, ''This Child's Gonna Live'' (1969), by Sarah E Wright, as a "neo-abolitionist" novel that "borrows from black nationalist discourse in its bold exploration of the loss of social ground gained in the Reconstruction South."
* Miller (2012) notes "the neo-abolitionist tone of nearly all the academic literature" on slavery.
* Abolitionism in the United States originally related to the abolition of slavery of African-descended peoples. In the 21st century, Lawrance and Roberts have applied the term "neoabolitionist" to opponents of contemporary sexual slavery, whose victims include people from every continent.
* In 2014, historian Yonatan Eyal argued that starting in the 1950s with Kenneth Stampp "the neo-abolitionist school diametrically flipped the views of the revisionists. It earned moral credibility in doing so, maturing as it did during the upheavals of the 1960s, yet at the same time lost the ability to explain the appeal of Union and compromise as formative influences on America's past." By 2008, Eyal continues: "More Americans identify with the Civil War as a struggle for a 'new birth of freedom,' rather than for the Union, and neo-abolitionist historiography has contributed to that sense over the past several decades."
[Yonatan Eyal, "Franklin Pierce, Democratic Partisan ," in Joel H. Silbey, ed. '' A Companion to the Antebellum Presidents 1837-1861'' (2014) p 347]
See also
*
Second Redemption
Second Redemption is a term that has been used regarding politics of the United States for the period following the election of 1968 characterized by more conservatism, and a retreat from governmental and judicial activism on issues of civil right ...
*
Second Reconstruction
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the United S ...
*
Redeemers
References
Notes
Sources
*
W. E. B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ( ; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American-Ghanaian sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in ...
, ''Black Reconstruction in America'' (1935/1962/reprint Free Press: 1998) with introduction by
David Levering Lewis .
*Martin Duberman,
The Avenging Angel, ''
The Nation
''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper tha ...
'', May 4, 2005
* Michael Fellman and Lewis Perry, eds., ''Antislavery Reconsidered,'' Louisiana State University Press: 1981.
* Michael Fellman, ''Prophets of Protests,'' New Press, 2006.
* Robert P. Green, Jr., "Reconstruction Historiography: A Source of Teaching Ideas", ''The Social Studies,'' (July/August 1991), pp. 153-15
online* Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds., ''Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism,'' The New Press, 2006.
* Lewis Perry. "Psychology and the Abolitionists: Reflections on Martin Duberman and the Neoabolitionism of the 1960s", ''Reviews in American History,'' Vol. 2, No. 3 (Sep., 1974), pp. 309–322
* Alrutheus A. Taylor, ''Negro in Tennessee 1865-1880'' (Reprint Co, June 1, 1974)
* Alrutheus A. Taylor, ''Negro in South Carolina During the Reconstruction'' (Ams Press: June 1924) {{ISBN, 0-404-00216-1
* Alrutheus A. Taylor, ''The Negro In The Reconstruction Of Virginia'' (Washington, DC: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History: 1926)
Abolitionism in the United States
Historiography of the United States
History of civil rights in the United States
Reconstruction Era
Social theories