Abolitionists And American Historians
Brodie, Fawn M.
One of the most celebrated passages in the writings of Mark Twain describes the episode where Huckleberry Finn, in helping the runaway slave Jim to freedom, is suddenly seized with guilt and...
...More than ever they came to dismiss the idealism of the abolitionists and Radicals as—in the words of William B. Hesseltine—"humanitarian gabble...
...12 Douglas Southall Freeman, Robert E. Lee, a Biography (4 vols., New York, 1935), I, 371, 380-87, 390-93, 637...
...Collected Works, II, 274...
...John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, a History of American Negroes (New York, 1948), and The Emancipation Proclamation (New York, 1963...
...25 This pointed the way to eventual universal Negro suffrage...
...27 David Donald in his biography Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, wielding a deft scalpel, lays bare certain signs of impotence and latent homosexuality in his hero with such subtlety that the reader is scarcely aware that he is witnessing a surgical operation...
...21 James M. Scovel, "Thaddeus Stevens," Lippincotts' Magazine, 6 (April 1898), 550...
...This holy blissful martyr thrived upon his torments," Donald writes, and he leads one to believe that Sumner's championing of the unpopular cause of antislavery was only an expression of his neurotic craving for persecution...
...5 See Robert L. Dabney, Life and Campaigns of Lieut-Gen...
...25 Basler, ed...
...By 1859 none had been emancipated...
...Far from being applauded for his compassion and courage in combating a corrosive blight, he is assailed for his fanaticism and "pertinacious meddling...
...South Carolina's Senator Andrew P. Butler, one of the authors of the mischievous Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, made thirty-six speeches defending slavery on the floor of the Senate, including some contemptuous personal references to his abolitionist colleague, Charles Sumner...
...For Davis' statement advocating slavery in California see Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 sess., app...
...And he waited until the end of the five-year period before signing the deeds of manumission, December 29, 1862...
...23 E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge, La., 1950), p. 264...
...As Avery Craven put it in his Civil War in the Making, "the Yanceys, the Rhetts, the Charles Sumners and the John Browns and their `fellow-travelers' .. . made war inevitable.1 And though the "plague on both your houses" " attitude would seem to imply a certain detachment, actually it is the fanatics for freedom who get the lion's share of the blame...
...10 The record is too detailed to be dismissed as a tasteless Southern joke...
...The fact that Davis wrote an approving letter to Brooks is reported by Edward L. Pierce in his Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (4 vols., Boston, 1893), II, 496...
...For the head of William H. Seward, mistaken for a burning abolitionist, the offer went up to $50,000...
...19 A year after the Proclamation Lincoln's own cabinet " member, Montgomery Blair, publicly accused the "Abolition party" of favoring "amalgamation, equality, and fraternity," and told his Maryland constituents that they would not lose their slaves.20 The war was almost over—January, 31, 1865—before the Republicans could muster enough votes to pass a resolution calling for a Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery, and then it passed only with the aid of Lincoln's quiet backstage pressure...
...What one misses, however, is a comparable clinical look—however brief—at the sick psyche of Preston Brooks...
...Frank B. Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln, Six Months at the White House (New York, 1868), p. 90...
...1 Avery Craven, The Civil War in the Making, 1815-1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1959), p. 114...
...Such statements are bolstered by a dexterous selection of early Lincoln statements and by ignoring the steady evolution of Lincoln's attitude toward Negro rights and the massive evidence of his cooperation with men in the radical wing of his party and they with him...
...Alexander McClure, Abraham Lincoln and Men of War Times (Philadelphia, 1892...
...After the war moderate Southerners who had originally attacked their own extremists and had opposed secession shifted ground and blamed the abolitionists as being at the root of the prewar trouble...
...it is Sumner's motives that are dissected in search of arrogance, or sexual impotence, or martyr hunger...
...3 James T. Adams, Epic of America (Boston, 1931), p. 275...
...On the subject of slaty y," Saunders wrote, "he assured me that he had always been in favour of the emancipation of the negroes, and that in Virginia the feeling had been strongly inclined in the same direction, till the ill-judged enthusiasm (amounting to rancour) of the abolitionists in the North had turned the Southern tide of feeling in the other direction...
...The plantation owners, after all, had much to lose, including—as they saw it—two billion dollars' worth of property...
...When the time shall arrive at which emancipation is proper," Strode quotes Davis as saying, "those most interested will be most anxious to effect it...
...17 Douglas, who has emerged in much revisionist literature as "a " realist in an emotional age," a man whose "national" view was superior to Lincoln's sectional view, said frankly of slavery: "I don't care whether it be voted up or down...
...he had a certain facility with words...
...27 (Madison, Wis., 1952), pp...
...It is likely that the continuing modern attacks on the abolitionists stem in part from anxiety over contemporary racial problems, and especially over the mounting militancy of the Negro himself...
...Many revisionist historians, impressed by the seeming sophistication of this historical posture, accepted it enthusiastically...
...20 William E. Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics (2 vols., New York, 1933), II, 228, 238, 269...
...15 " The slaveholders' assaults on the abolitionists are more easily understood, nevertheless, than the similar attacks by Northerners...
...11 Robert E. Lee, Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee (New York, 1924), p 231...
...Still it happened that when two of the slaves fled toward freedom and were captured in Maryland, he had them brought back and sent to southern Virginia where it was less easy to escape...
...176, 336, 295, 290...
...And in our own generation we have seen the beginning of a resurgence of respect and admiration for "the great agitators...
...Typical of many statements in our own time is that of Robert S. Henry, who in his Story of the Confederacy insisted that "Forty years of agitation against slavery, growing more intolerant and impassioned year by year, had effectively killed the movement in the South for gradual emancipation...
...Avery Craven in his Coming of the Civil War wrote that the whole intellectual life of the South was "al most frozen, not so much to justify a questionable labor system as to repel a fanatical attack.13 Surely the prewar Southern fury against the " abolitionist can hardly be explained as the anger of one man against another over a system both wanted to see extinct...
...Some writers even try to replace the word slave by the word servant, as if expecting that the ancient, terrible curse could be exorcised by a simple, semantic trick...
...the hidden motives of Senator Butler and Preston Brooks are left inviolate...
...Harold Hyman in his biography of Stanton restores to his proper eminence a Radical Republican who had fallen so low in the esteem of historians that they could pay serious heed to the fantastic charge that he had connived in Lincoln's murder...
...The irony implicit in this sequence is Mark Twain's...
...Now historians from every section and representing every shade of opinion try desperately to claim him for their own...
...In recounting Davis' reaction to Preston Brooks' beating of Sumner, Strode states that "Davis realized that Brooks had done the pro-slavery forces considerable harm," failing to note that Davis wrote a letter to Brooks praising his character and the deed.4 Many histories of the Confederacy are written with such skillful disregard of the ugly that slavery shrinks to an unpleasant anomaly of small consequence...
...with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time...
...This estate was willed to Lee's wife in 1857, and Lee was made executor of all Custis' property with express orders to free his 196 slaves within five years and find work for them on his farms...
...204, 284...
...4 Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis, American Patriot, 1808-1861 (New York, 1955), pp...
...Lee blamed the delay on legal complications attending the will...
...15 Keitt is quoted in Allan Nevins, Emergence of Lincoln (2 vols., New York, 1950), II, 288...
...But the attempt to turn Lincoln into something close to an anti-abolitionist would have astonished the old Confederates, who realistically—from their point of view —labeled Lincoln an abolitionist despite his public protestations that he was not one at all but only antislavery...
...he is condemned for taking Puritanism into politics, and is accused of being a major cause of the Civil War...
...I should like to begin with the Abolitionists at once...
...The fact, however, that King is permitted to preach in the South at all is a measure of the improvement in the nation's moral health since 1850...
...18 For a discussion of revisionist attitudes toward Douglas see Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (Princeton, 1954), pp...
...This essay is printed from The Antislavery Vanguard, ed...
...Garrison, she says, "knew he wanted a cause...
...All the abolitionists, she adds, were "eagerly bidding for a martyr's crown...
...bankrupt the country and finally deluge it with blood...
...It takes not on law, but the enforcement of law to keep it out...
...Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (2 vols., New York, 1947), II, 440...
...As Thaddeus Stevens commented cryptically, "The greatest measure of the nineteenth century was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America...
...12 Certainly during the war, if Lee had had a bad conscience about fighting to preserve the slave system, it had not noticeably impaired his aggressive skill and daring...
...The neo-Marxists, on the other hand, stimulated by the writing of Charles Beard, did not glorify the abolitionists, but by overemphasizing the economic differences dividing the North and South tended to minimize and obscure the profoundly moral issue of slavery and to support those who insist on the "needlessness" of the Civil War...
...The diagnosis," writes Donald, "is that Sumner was not shamming, but that his ailments were not, neurologically, the result of Brooks' beating...
...Toward the last he bellowed like a calf...
...And when Jim reveals his plan to earn money to buy his wife and children, plans which include getting "an Ab'litionist to go and steal them" if their master wouldn't sell them, Huck is horrified...
...But he might well repeat today what Garrison said more than a century ago when reproached for the heat and severity of his language: "I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt...
...But for the most part the abolitionists and Radical Republicans have been under remarkably sustained attack...
...David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (New York, 1956...
...A detailed examination of this attack is long overdue...
...His most patient public and private pleadings failed to persuade the border states to accept gradual emancipation, even with compensation...
...The soldiers of other States will not execute it...
...But for years he had participated actively in all the pleasant aspects of plantation life on the beautiful Arlington estate of his father-in-law, which was home for his wife and children...
...One thing is certain: in Huckleberry Finn the abolitionist is no hero to the boy who is himself playing the role of abolitionist...
...No one would guess in reading Strode's volumes that Davis argued hotly for slavery in California ("I hold that the pursuit of gold washing and mining is better adapted to slave labor than to any other"), that he fought to make slavery permanent in Kansas and encouraged conspiracies to annex Cuba and convert her to a slave state...
...Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: a History of the Great Rebellion, in the United States of America 1860-64 (2 vols., Hartford, 1864-66...
...And Donald reduces the whole abolitionist Zeitgeist to a neurotic disturbance by writing cynically, "The freeing of the slaves ended the great crusade that had brought purpose and joy to the abolitionist...
...To compound the paradox, we have on the other hand the everaccelerating glorification of moderate Southern leaders, notably Robert E. Lee, who, though he fought with devotion as well as skill for a government dedicated to slavery, has become a national hero only a step below Lincoln...
...Hazel C. Wolf, for example, in her book On Freedom's Altar, the Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement, describes Theodore Weld as one who "gloried in the persecution he suffered," and who "lovingly wore the martyr's crown of thorns...
...Joshua Giddings, History of the Rebellion (New York, 1864...
...22 Speech at Peoria, Ill., October 16, 1854, Basler, ed...
...George Julian, Political Recollections (Chicago, 1884), p. 92, and Life of Joshua R. Giddings (Chicago, 1892), pp...
...26 " Perhaps the most subtle attack on the abolitionists is that which exploits the vocabulary though not much of the insight of modern psychiatry...
...And it is one of the paradoxes of American history that a nation that has for generations delighted in the complexities attending Jim's escape still looks upon the abolitionist with suspicion and occasional hatred...
...Shortly after, Congressman Haskell of Tennessee went on record in the House as proposing that Joshua Giddings should be "hanged as high as Haman...
...In his last public address Lincoln urged immediate suffrage for the educated Negro and the Negro soldier...
...61, 36...
...Some years later Senator Foote of Mississippi won the sobriquet "Hangman Foote" by saying in the Senate that if abolitionist John P. Hale came to Mississippi he would be hanged to one of the tallest trees in the forest, and that he himself would assist in the operation...
...Richard Hofstadter, American Political Tradition (New York, 1954...
...They will lay violent hands on those who differ with them politically in opinion, or dare question their infallibility...
...By April 1860, when it was Congressman Roger Pryor threatening to hang Owen Lovejoy "higher than Haman" if he set foot in Virginia, the phrase had become a cliché . 9 But the threat was no cliche, and certainly it was no jest...
...What we have had instead—as in Lincoln and the Radicals by T. Harry Williams—is a minute examination of the differences between Lincoln and the abolitionists and Radicals in his own party...
...To all the crimes already laid at the feet of the abolitionists a new one was added—the crime of differing with Lincoln...
...I wore my cane out completely, but saved the Head which is gold...
...16 Quoted in George Fort Milton, Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (Boston, 1934), p. 506n...
...Martin Duberman, to be published by Princeton University Press...
...The record includes Lincoln's friendship and affection for Radicals like Edwin M. Stanton, Owen Lovejoy, and Charles Sumner, as well as his respect for and sagacious use of the great parliamentary talents of Thaddeus Stevens...
...Except in the eyes of the Negro and a small minority of whites he has never been accepted as hero...
...George F. Milton, The Age of Hate (New York, 1930), p. 262...
...2 It is the incendiary paragraphs from Sumner's not " Butler's speeches that are invariably quoted...
...Or of the fire-eater George Fitzhugh, who reversed the eloquent antislavery statement of Jefferson to read as follows: "Some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them—and the riding does them good...
...14 It is the vigor " in slavery that needs exploring—the psychic as well as economic rewards derived from practicing it...
...Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War, p. 162...
...That slavery itself was so great a sin that many people could fight against it with a passion that was not neurotic seems with Donald to be inadmissible...
...One does not find sufficient explanation simply in the invention of the cotton gin, with all its multiform economic consequences, nor in the favored theory that Southern obstreperousness was a natural reaction to the intemperance of the abolitionist...
...He was repaid by being beaten into insensibility by Congressman Brooks in the Senate Chamber...
...David Donald in his Lincoln Reconsidered asserts, "On all crucial issues Lincoln was closer to George B. McClellan or Horatio Seymour than to many members of his own party...
...Collected Works, VIII, 254...
...All Donald tells us by way of explaining Brooks' motivation is that "under his placid exterior, there burned a smoldering hatred of abolitionists, a proud devotion to the South and to South Carolina, an intense loyalty to his family, and a determination to live by the code of a gentleman.28 " "I hope," says Donald in his preface, "that no one will accuse me of sympathizing with Negro slavery because I have not interjected a little moral discourse after each of Sumner's orations to the effect that he was on the side of the angels...
...It is proper that Professor Donald should be aware of the immense legacy of Freud...
...2 Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1942), P. 367...
...Collected Works, VIII, 403...
...And though the actual differences had much to do with timing and very little to do with principle or compassion, many historians have so magnified them that they have gravely distorted the image of Lincoln himself...
...22 Lincoln had been fond of this simile, " returning to it often in the debates with Douglas...
...But there is a certain honesty of attitude in the old vituperation, and one gets a much sharper picture of what the Civil War was all about by reading the violently partisan and proslavery biography of Jackson written by his chaplain, R. L. Dabney, published in 1866, than by the more seriously researched but still sentimentalized biography of Lenoir Chambers published in 1959.6 There was one period in our history when a substantial number of historians described the abolitionists as just and courageous fighters for freedom...
...Certainly one gets from the book the author's feeling that Sumner was somehow responsible for the sin of the Civil War...
...The total Lincoln anti-slavery record, beginning with his earliest attempts as Congressman to get slavery abolished in the District of Columbia, and continuing to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which he described with satisfaction as "the king's cure for all the evils," and "the great event of the nineteenth century, 24 is as certain a march in " the direction of Negro freedom as that of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee was away from it...
...It was Horatio Seymour, distinguished Governor of New York, who met the tragedy of secession with a cynical letter to ex-President Franklin Pierce: "The Union is about gone already...
...Collected Works, II, 264...
...One of the most celebrated passages in the writings of Mark Twain describes the episode where Huckleberry Finn, in helping the runaway slave Jim to freedom, is suddenly seized with guilt and almost demoralized by the enormity of his behavior...
...it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more...
...17 Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, I 295...
...If the reputation of the abolitionists has suffered by their being dexterously separated from Lincoln, it has suffered also by their being warmly embraced in recent times by the American Communists, who heralded them as forerunners of the Second American Revolution...
...B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York, 1948), p. 285...
...Irving Bartlett, Wendell Phillips, Brahmin Radical (Boston, 1962...
...If it is true, as Lincoln said, that it is "kindly provided that of all those who come into the world only a small percentage are natural tyrants,8 then the American historian " must explain better than he has previously why the citizens of a vast area that had once tolerated abolition and colonization societies turned against them in a single generation and made "Death to the abolitionist" a sectional shibboleth...
...lo Lincoln more than any man of his time felt the full pressure of the anti-Negro, anti-abolitionist tradition of the Democrats and Copperheads, which plagued him throughout the war and rose to formidable proportions during the election of 1864...
...George W. Julian, Political Recollections, 1840-1872 (Chicago, 1884...
...10 George W. Julian, Political Recollections, p. 173...
...9 W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), p. 108...
...They did not overlook the fact that as early as 1854 he said that slavery was "hid away in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death...
...Surely in the middle of the twentieth century there are some things that do not need to be said...
...26 Wm...
...May my curse fall upon their heads if they do...
...James F. Rhodes History of the United States (New York, 1906), II, 438...
...Who has bothered to examine clinically the pathology of men like Representative Lawrence Keitt, who helped Brooks in his assault on Sumner by holding at bay with his pistol the Senators who tried to interfere, and who in July 1860 accused the Republican party of being "stained with treason, hideous with insurrection, and dripping with blood...
...The label of the "abolitionist-Marxist stereotype" has been used to condemn so able a writer as W. E. B. DuBois, whose embracing of Marxism actually accounts very little for the distortions in his admittedly impassioned early histories of his own people, histories which were much-needed correctives to numerous white stereotypes...
...13 Robert S. Henry, The Story of the Confederacy (New York, 1931), p. 14...
...Jefferson Davis in a recent biograby by Hudson Strode emerges as "the most misunderstood man in history," a Southerner who all along was in favor of gradual emancipation...
...7 See Dwight L. Dumond, Antislavery: Crusade for Freedom in America (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961...
...To these people Martin Luther King has much in common with Garrison and Wendell Phillips, though neither was as self-disciplined...
...Thomas J. Jackson (New York, 1866...
...It is good to see that Donald, in describing Sumner's three-year search for health after the Brooks beating, disagrees with the conventional Southern view that he was a poltroon and coward and was faking illness out of fear of returning to his seat...
...Webster had said in his famous speech of March 7, 1850, "If the infernal fanatics and abolitionists ever get the power in their hands, they will override the Constitution, set the Supreme Court at defiance, change and make Laws to suit themselves...
...No one knows if ever he secretly fantasied himself as surgeon...
...The resulting damage by association has been deadly...
...Sumner made three speeches attacking slavery, in the third of which he also made some indelicate personal references...
...when it is between negro and the crocodile, I am for the negro...
...Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis, Confederate President, II, 310...
...19 Congressional Globe, 37 Cong., 3 sess., January 8, 1863, p. 243...
...But it was Northerners who burned abolitionist meeting halls, who mobbed Garrison and Weld, who murdered Elijah Lovejoy...
...he had a mania for uniqueness and for attention...
...This was shortly after the Civil War, when men like Henry Wilson, Horace Greeley, Alexander McClure, Joshua Giddings, John A. Logan, and George W. Julian, many of whom had themselves been either active abolitionists or Radical Republicans, were eager to put down the facts of history as they saw them...
...And again, "When the struggle is between the white man and the negro, I am for the white man...
...a Virginia editor offered a reward of $10,000 for the kidnapping and delivery to Richmond of Joshua R. Giddings, or $5,000 for his head...
...8 Speech in Peoria, Ill., October 16, 1854, Roy P. Basler, ed...
...John A. Logan, The Great Conspiracy, its Origin and History (New York, 1886...
...We thank the publisher and editor for their kind permission...
...When Lee blamed the abolitionists for turning the Southerners against emancipation, he helped raise a lame defense into a respected pattern of thought...
...I, p. 154, February 14, 1850...
...the new radicalism, many now assert, with its integrationists and Freedom Riders, may well also end in a gigantic blood bath...
...modern specialists classify Sumner's illness as 'post-traumatic syndrome...
...The old radicalism, many have said, brought on the holocaust of the Civil War...
...For them Abraham Lincoln was not the Great Emancipator...
...3, 19, 4. 23 David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1961), pp...
...16 And it is in the speeches of " Northerners like Daniel Webster and Stephen A. Douglas that one hears truly modern overtones, suspicion and hatred of radicalism, cynicism, apathy, and simple dislike of the Negro...
...Back in 1862 Edward Pollard, writing his Southern History of the War, called Lincoln a "Yankee monster of inhumanity and falsehood...
...These were the nation's lawmakers speaking to other lawmakers, and laws ordering the death penalty for abolitionists peppered the statute books of the South...
...John L. Thomas, The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963...
...But in our recent histories it is Sumner's speech that is deplored for its "disregard of truth and sportsmanship," for its "deplorable taste" and "pure rant...
...Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flatfooted and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn't even know: a man that hadn't ever done me no harm...
...Oscar Sherwin, Prophet of Liberty, the Life and Time of Wendell Phillips (New York, 1958...
...Fitzhugh is quoted in Harvey Wish, George Fitzhugh, Propagandist of the Old South (Baton Rouge, La., 1943), p. 97...
...The distortion of history by omission is just as real as distortion by vituperation...
...In our time E. Merton Coulter writes that Lincoln "held out tenaciously against issuing a proclamation freeing the slaves," and Hudson Strode holds that Lincoln "could foresee no bright destiny for Negroes in the United States, and, by his own testimony he wanted them out of the country...
...As early as 1836 South Carolina's Congressman J. H. Hammond said, "I warn the abolitionists, ignorant and infatuated barbarians as they are, that if chance shall throw any of them into our hands, they may expect a felon's death," [and, as the courageous Southerner, W. J. Cash, pointed out in his The Mind of the South, "the overwhelming body of his countrymen cheered him hotly...
...Collected Works, III, 130...
...2' " The sobering story of the Democratic and Copperhead opposition to Lincoln, and the extraordinary persistence of proslavery sentiment in the North, needs retelling...
...It got to troubling me so I couldn't rest," he says...
...Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom, Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830-1860 (East Lansing, Mich., 1949...
...what is disturbing is that in fitfully employing the psychiatrist's tools he shows little of the psychiatrist's compassion...
...Dwight L. Dumond's new study of the antislavery crusade helps to put the great reform movement in its true perspective but it is only a beginning...
...The state of Georgia officially offered $5,000 for whoever should kidnap Garrison and bring him to Georgia for trial...
...349 Historians continue to use the scalpel on both the abolitionists and their political successors, the Radical Republicans, labeling them vindictive, laying bare their neuroses, equating their "fanaticism for freedom" with the fire-eaters' "fanaticism for slavery...
...For them it was enough that he was on public record as "hating" slavery, as hoping for its "ultimate extinction," and resolutely opposing its expansion...
...It most froze me to hear such talk," Huck says...
...It includes Lincoln's approval of Congressional bills providing for abolition of segregation on horse-drawn streetcars in Washington, for the acceptance of Negro witnesses in Federal courts, for the equalizing of penalties for the same crime...
...Actually Lee's own "anti-slavery" record was cloudier than his devoted admirers made it out to be...
...In stead he betrays a pervasive distaste for Sumner and an absence of respect for the nobility of his cause...
...11 Lee's postwar image swiftly emerged: a gentle, compassionate man who had always favored gradual abolition and who had freed his own slaves, a general who had fought against the Union only because he could not bear the violation of his native state...
...Unfortunately, the student is easily snared by a fine writer...
...14 Speech at Jonesboro, Ill., September 15, 1858, Basler, ed...
...It is true that he had never owned more than half a dozen slaves, several of whom he had freed and sent to Liberia...
...It is commonplace now for historians to assert or imply that abolitionist indignation over slavery was a kind of collective neurosis, and that the agitators were all likely to be somewhat obsessional or paranoid...
...6 Henry Wilson, History of the Antislavery Measures of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Congress 1861-64 (Boston, 1864), and History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (3 vols., Boston, 1877...
...Robert E. Lee publicly fastened the blame in an interview with Britisher Herbert C. Saunders, August 22, 1866...
...the Brooks' assault produced psychic wounds that lingered long after the physical injuries had disappeared...
...243-44...
...John L. Thomas, Irving Bartlett, Russel B. Nye, John Hope Franklin, Richard Hofstadter, and Oscar Sherwin have all made detailed studies of the abolitionists, 7 and none is apologetic for the "moral causes" underlying what Winston Churchill has called the "noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts...
...It is treated as an essential transition from African savagery to enlightened citizenship, a labor system which would somehow easily have evolved into freedom without war...
...3 " Such judgments are pronounced about a man who started out as an abolitionist lawyer defending fugitive slaves in Pennsylvania, and who climaxed his career by fathering that potentially great bulwark of individual liberty, the Fourteenth Amendment...
...It includes his friend ship for the famous ex-slave Frederick Douglass, and his easy willingness to break a precedent and accept a Negro as Ambassador from Haiti...
...Lincoln said in 1858, "There is vigor enough in slavery to plant itself in a new country even against unfriendly legislation...
...It is merely a matter of dollars and cents...
...he was the killer of 23 " the dream...
...the guilt and ambivalence were, however, a reflection of widespread and astonishingly tenacious attitudes...
...And where moral judgments are implicit in ironic phrases, where hostility determines the selection and omission of quotations, an atmosphere can be created where the student has no consciousness of the extent of the historical distortion...
...John F. Hume, The Abolitionists, 1839-1864 (New York, 1905), P. 13...
...24 Speech from the White House, February 1, 1865, Basler, ed...
...It includes his urging of Federal aid for the welfare and schooling of the newly freed slave...
...261-67...
...We have deferred cutting throats long enough...
...A recent biography of Stonewall Jackson omits critical evidence of Jackson's fanaticism, like his first speech to his troops, in which he urged a war to the death with no prisoners taken...
...I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead...
...But certainly when the war powers gave him the right to cut, he did not refrain from using the knife, and his timing and skill were of the highest professional quality...
...Thaddeus Stevens until recently had a reputation as low as any political figure in American history—described by George Fort Milton, for example, as "an apostle of proscription and hate," and by James Truslow Adams as "perhaps the most despicable, malevolent and morally deformed character who has ever risen to high power in America...
...His Emancipation Proclamation met a mixed reception, a typical border state reaction being that of Representative Wadsworth of Kentucky, who protested in the House, "As to that proclamation, we despise and laugh at it...
...I gave him about 30 firstrate stripes," Donald quotes him as saying...
...Even the original fury of the slaveholders against the abolitionists has yet to be adequately explored...
...Lenoir Chambers, Stonewall Jackson, the Legend and the Man (2 vols., New York, 1959...
...Harold Hyman and B. P. Thomas, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War (New York, 1962...
Vol. 12 • July 1965 • No. 3
