Neoabolitionism

Neoabolitionist (or neo-abolitionist or new abolitionism) is a term used in historiography to characterize historians of race relations 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 history, slavery, the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era.

As abolitionists had worked in the 19th century to end slavery and provide equal rights under the US Constitution to blacks, the new activists worked to enforce constitutional rights for all citizens and restore equality under the law for African Americans, including the practice of suffrage and civil rights.

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 and Jim Crow laws. 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 at Columbia University, 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.

In the 19th century after Reconstruction, former abolitionists, especially African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, presented positive views of its achievements: gaining of civil rights for African Americans, and expanded suffrage to include poor whites. In the early 20th century, Fisk University historian Alrutheus Taylor described the period of Reconstruction in North Carolina and Tennessee in several books and articles. W. E. B. Du Bois, 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.[1]

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.[2] Through the later 20th century, such historians as David W. Blight,[3] Michael Les Benedict,[4] James McPherson, John Hope Franklin,[5] and Steven Hahn[6] 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.

They 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 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.

Contemporary historians observed that depriving African Americans of suffrage and civil rights, as had been done in the South following Reconstruction, was itself a terrible form of corruption. They considered it a violation of the tenets of representative government, 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. His title, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), emphasized the "unfinished" theme in its subtitle, explicitly connecting Reconstruction to the American Revolution, 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

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.[3]
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."[16]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Kenneth Milton Stampp; Leon F. Litwack, eds. (1969). Reconstruction: An Anthology of Revisionist Writings. Louisiana State UP. p. 221.
  2. ↑ Martin Duberman, ed. The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists 1966
  3. 1 2 David W. Blight (2001). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Belknap Press;. pp. 2–3. ISBN 0-674-00819-7.
  4. ↑ Michael Les Benedict (1974). A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863-1869. Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. ISBN 0-393-05524-8.
  5. ↑ John Hope Franklin with Alfred Moss (2001). From Slavery to Freedom. A History of African Americans (8th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 0-07-112058-0.
  6. ↑ Steven Hahn (2004). A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01765-X.
  7. ↑ McPherson (1975), pp 5, 390
  8. ↑ Stampp, "The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery", American Historical Review, Vol. 57, No. 3. (April 1952), pp. 613-624
  9. ↑ Tindall, "Mythology: A New Frontier in Southern History," in Frank E. Vandiver, ed., The Idea of the South: Pursuit of a Central Theme (1964), pp 5–6
  10. ↑ Peter Novick (1988). That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge UP. p. 351n.
  11. ↑ Review by Don E. Fehrenbacher, American Historical Review (Oct., 1969) 75#1 pp. 212-213 in JSTOR
  12. ↑ review by C. Vann Woodward, American Historical Review, (April 1974), p. 471
  13. ↑ See 57 citations
  14. ↑ Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (1986), p. xix
  15. ↑ Harvard Sitkoff (2001). "Segregation, Desegregation, Resegregation: African American Education, A Guide to the Literature". Organization of American Historians. ISSN 0882-228X.
  16. ↑ Fellman, Prophets of Protests (2006), pp ix-x
  17. ↑ Review by: Christopher Metress, American Historical Review, (February 2005) 110#1 p 155 in JSTOR
  18. ↑ George M Fredrickson (2008). Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race. Harvard University Press. pp. 131 note 13.
  19. ↑ Winthrop D. Jordan (2008). Slavery and the American South. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p. 115. ISBN 978-1-60473-199-6.
  20. ↑ Zeus Leonardo (2009). Race, Whiteness, and Education. Taylor & Francis. p. 169.
  21. ↑ Allen C. Guelzo (2009). Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas. Southern Illinois University. p. 100.
  22. ↑ David Seed (2010). A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction. John Wiley & Sons. p. 86.
  23. ↑ Joseph C. Miller (2012). The Problem of Slavery As History: A Global Approach. Yale University Press. pp. 120, also pp 1, 9, 38, 158.
  24. ↑ Benjamin N. Lawrance; Richard L. Roberts (2012). Trafficking in Slavery's Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa. Ohio University Press. p. 164.
  25. ↑ Yonatan Eyal, "Franklin Pierce, Democratic Partisan ," in Joel H. Silbey, ed. A Companion to the Antebellum Presidents 1837-1861 (2014) p 347

Sources

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