Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 20: Were abolitionists cynical conservatives? (Hint:no)

"Abolitionists succeeded despite rather than because of political and economic elites, many of whom were complicit in the political economy of slavery and would spend a lot of time containing abolition’s reach after emancipation."

That's from a very recent academic article historian Manisha Sinha, "The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism" American Historical Review 124:1 (Feb 2019). I was attracted by the title of the article, because there are all sorts of interesting questions about the relationship of the Southern slave system in the United States to the broader capitalist economy. But the time I finished the article, I was feeling like a downright fan.

Sinha is the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016). Her AHR article uses a book by David Brion Davis, one of the most important historians of American slavery, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975) to talk about the various ways historians have described the abolitionists.

The social and class function of abolitionism touches on a couple of major issues in the historiography. One is the question of what role slavery played in the development of American capitalism. One set of views sees slavery as fundamental to the national economy as a whole in the early American and antebellum periods. Another emphasizes the radically different bases of the slave economy in the South and the free-labor economy of the North, regarding both as brands of capitalism.

Another important though quirky historian of American slavery is Eugene Genovese, who also published jointly with his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. His main "quirk" is that he initially established his reputation as one of the most highly regarded of the New Left Marxist historians of the 1960s. He later adopted a John Calhounian perspective, using elements of Marxist analysis but basically becoming an advocate for the big Southern slaveowners.

(Richard Hofstadter famously described John Calhoun as the "Marx of the master class" because he saw a key political conflict based on the varying class interests of the capitalist class and workers, but saw himself as very much the ally of Northern capitalists and Southern planters in that conflict. John Calhoun died in 1850. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 but was little known then outside radical democratic circles in the German lands. So far as I'm aware, Calhoun himself never actually heard of Karl Marx, much less being directly influenced by his class analysis. An German intellectual who was an analogous figure to Calhoun in his view of classes and politics was the Bavarian philosopher and theologian Franz von Baader [1765-1841], who was an important figure in reactionary political thought in Europe as Calhoun was in the US.)

Sinha notes that Genovese "portrayed the slave South as a premodern, pre-capitalist society and its critics as bourgeois reformers. The notion that hypocritical abolitionists critiqued slavery while remaining blind to the sufferings of the working poor closer to home had of course originated with southern defenders of slavery, whom Genovese quixotically admired as conservative critics of capitalism." (my emphasis)

This is one of those cases when historical interpretation can be appropriate for a variety of political perspectives. Sinha also recalls, "In American historiography, the Civil War and Reconstruction were long described as imperialist ventures by Progressive historians, where northern industry under the guise of antislavery reduced the agrarian South to the position of an internal colony." (my emphasis)

The best known Progressive historians were Charles and Mary Beard. They were generally regarded as being on the left. But Charles Beard became particularly attracted to Isolationist politics in the 1930s. His last book was President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948), which advanced the rightwing-isolationist conspiracy theory that FDR somehow planned or deliberately allowed the Japanese attack o Pearl Harbor in 1941. Britannica Online has an article by historian Robert Dallek on this crackpot theory, which nevertheless is also a sort of foundational theory for many American conservatives. (Pearl Harbor and the “Back Door to War” Theory; revised 11/12/2004)

But even before that seeming hard-right turn in his perspective, Beard's work to some extent a superficial view of economic influence in politics that fit nicely with early 20th century Progressive reformers' good-government concerns, but could all-too-easily fit into a resigned or cynical conservative view, i.e., "everybody's just in it for a buck."

The Progressive theory Sinha describes seems to fit nicely into that dubious category: the abolition of slavery wasn't about freedom, democracy, or human rights, but about manipulative politics by greedy Northern businessmen. Which, as she also indicates, just happens to coincide with the propaganda claims of antebellum defenders of slavery. Conservatives just seem to be more active and creative in finding a "usuable past" for their purposes than the left and center-left generally are.

Sinha's article does quite a bit of debunking of this argument while giving a broad account of the historigraphical currents involved. (And providing copious references to the professional literature.) She argues sensibly and accurately, "Abolitionists succeeded despite rather than because of political and economic elites, many of whom were complicit in the political economy of slavery and would spend a lot of time containing abolition’s reach after emancipation."

Like many social and political movements, abolitionism attracted a wide variety of characters with varying motivations. She writes:

If slavery lies at the heart of the development of Anglo-American capitalism, as some recent historians contend, then surely the movement to abolish it can be seen as, at the very least, its obverse, and anti-capitalist in its very premise, the emancipation of labor. ...

Many abolitionists critiqued the economics of slavery and the oppressive nature of early capitalism. Some flirted with utopian socialism and labor and land reform movements. In my own reading, the abolitionist international of the nineteenth century ... included radical republicans, communitarians, feminists, pacifists, and anti-imperialists ...

In American historiography, the standard definition of an abolitionist has always been someone who not only opposed the existence of slavery but also demanded African American citizenship. In contrast, antislavery could include a range of positions against slavery and no necessary commitment to black equality, even though most antislavery politicians were more open to the possibility of black civil and political rights than their peers. Moreover, the free labor ideology of the antebellum Republican Party was not so much a vindication of wage labor as it harked back to the world of economically independent male republican proprietors, a vision that would become obsolete with the industrial takeoff in the United States from 1870 to 1920.