Book Review: Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865-1909

Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865-1909. By Raymond James Krohn. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023, 288 pp. Paperback $35.00.

Reviewed by Patrick Young

While abolitionism stretched back as a movement to the 18th Century, the abolitionism of the Civil War Era was a product of the 1830s. With the massive repression of anti-slavery activists in the South by the slave states in that decade, and with slavery almost dead in the North, the abolitionist movement began a reexamination of its goals. Abolitionism always aimed to end slavery, but its objectives broadened in the 1830s. The American Anti-Slavery Society’s (AASS) 1833 constitution had its members pledge to “elevate” the condition of Black people in the United States, to work towards “removing public prejudice” based on color, and to create a society where African Americans would “share an equality with whites of civil and religious privileges,” in the words of that 190-year-old document.

Raymond Krohn in his new book Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865–1909, published by Fordham University Press, looks at how prominent abolitionists who began their militancy during this revolutionary period in race relations told their stories during the four decades following the Civil War. While the AASS clearly had within its constitution several goals which envisioned working with freedpeople to achieve their equality in a post-emancipation society, not all of its adherents stayed loyal to abolitionism’s fundamentally radical critique of white supremacy beyond slavery.

As Krohn points out, many abolitionists were free or formerly-enslaved Black men and women. These Black community builders learned from their experiences before the end of slavery and adapted these strategies to support formerly-enslaved Southerners freed by emancipation. While some white abolitionists considered shuttering the AASS after Lincoln issued his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, Frederick Douglass said in response that their work was not complete until “black men of the South, and the black men of the North, shall have been admitted, fully and completely, into the body politic of America.” (p. 12) Many Black abolitionists stated in their reflections that the system of white supremacy was set up to bolster race-based slavery, but the abolition of slavery did not remove the ideological belief that whites were superior to all other races.

In this book, Krohn examines late 19th and early 20th Century literature from Black and white activists who fought against slavery before the 13^th Amendment to find out what really mattered about the experience. Other reform movements into which the abolitionists moved after 1865 also used this bildungsroman writing about the coming of age of a popular movement. Many people likely already know about activists incorporating tactics from the anti-slavery movement during the women’s suffrage struggle, but one might not know about abolitionism’s influence on the efforts to stop the human trafficking of women (“White Slavery”) and to end the sale of alcoholic beverages (“Enslaved to Alcohol”).

Apart from the reform struggles the memoirists raised in their histories of the abolitionist movement, Krohn says that they also tended to concentrate on activists who reflected their own contributions. For example, Samuel May, a Unitarian minister from elite Massachusetts society, portrayed the abolitionist mainstream as upholding the virtues that were typically viewed as foundational to American society. The accomplishments of the Civil War were only a starting point to fulfill America’s promise. May wrote, “May the sad experience of the past, prompt and impel our nation . . . to do all for the colored population of our country, South and North, that righteousness demands at our hands.” (p. 22) Other writers, like the formerly enslaved William Wells Brown, looked at the lessons learned during the fight for freedom to bolster and encourage Black post-war activism. Others, like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister who participated in the violent anti-slavery defiance of slave catchers before the war, and commanded a regiment of Black troops in South Carolina, seemed to turn his back on militant abolitionism in his memoir three decades later.

Krohn also looks at women like Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Ellen Craft, Abigail Kelley Foster, Mary Grew, Sallie Holley, and Julia Ward Howe, who wanted “to use in the new era the machinery which has wrought so well in the past” to also free women.

While Manisha Sinha’s book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition remains the most complete history of U.S. anti-slavery impulses and one that provides a foundation for students beginning to learn about the movement, Abolitionist Twilights contributes to the historiography of abolitionism by extending the movement’s traditional period of influence on American life well past the end of the Civil War and emancipation.

Sources:

American Anti-Slavery Society’s Constitution