Stanley Harrold

This ambitious book provides the only systematic examination of the American abolition movement's direct impacts on antislavery politics from colonial times to the Civil War and after. As opposed to indirect methods such as propaganda, sermons, and speeches at protest meetings, Stanley Harrold focuses on abolitionists' political tactics—petitioning, lobbying, establishing bonds with sympathetic politicians—and on their disruptions of slavery itself.Harrold begins with the abolition movement's relationship to politics and government in the northern American colonies and goes on to evaluate its effect in a number of crucial contexts-the U.S. Congress during the 1790s, the Missouri Compromise, the struggle over slavery in Illinois during the 1820s, and abolitionist petitioning of Congress during that same decade. He shows how the rise of ""immediate"" abolitionism, with its emphasis on moral suasion, did not diminish direct abolitionists' impact on Congress during the 1830s and 1840s. The book also addresses abolitionists' direct actions against slavery itself, aiding escaped or kidnapped slaves, which led southern politicians to demand the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a major flashpoint of antebellum politics. Finally, Harrold investigates the relationship between abolitionists and the Republican Party through the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Abraham Lincoln has often been called the “Great Emancipator.” But he was not among those Americans who, decades before the Civil War, favored immediate emancipation of all slaves inside the United States. Those who did were the abolitionists—the men and women who sought freedom and equal rights for all African Americans. Stanley Harrold traces how, despite Lincoln’s political distance from abolitionists, they influenced his evolving political orientation before and during the Civil War.While explaining how the abolitionist movement evolved, Harrold also clarifies Lincoln’s connections with and his separation from this often fiery group. For most of his life Lincoln regarded abolitionists as dangerous fanatics. Like many northerners during his time, Lincoln sought compromise with the white South regarding slavery, opposed abolitionist radicalism, and doubted that free black people could have a positive role in America. Yet, during the 1840s and 1850s, conservative northern Democrats as well as slaveholders branded Lincoln an abolitionist because of his sympathy toward black people and opposition to the expansion of slavery.Lincoln’s election to the presidency and the onslaught of the Civil War led to a transformation of his relationship with abolitionists. Lincoln’s original priority as president had been to preserve the Union, not to destroy slavery. Nevertheless many factors—including contacts with abolitionists—led Lincoln to favor ending slavery. After Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and raised black troops, many, though not all, abolitionists came to view him more favorably.Providing insight into the stressful, evolving relationship between Lincoln and the abolitionists, and also into the complexities of northern politics, society, and culture during the Civil War era, this concise volume illuminates a central concern in Lincoln’s life and presidency.

This book, the latest in the Seminar Studies in History series, examines the movement to abolish slavery in the US, from the origins of the movement in the eighteenth century through to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Books in this Seminar Studies in History series bridge the gap between textbook and specialist survey and consists of a brief "Introduction" and/or "Background" to the subject, valuable in bringing the reader up-to-speed on the area being examined, followed by a substantial and authoritative section of "Analysis" focusing on the main themes and issues. There is a succinct "Assessment" of the subject, a generous selection of "Documents" and a detailed bibliography. Stanley Harrold provides an accessible introduction to the subject, synthesizing the enormous amount of literature on the topic. American Abolitionists explores "the roles of slaves and free blacks in the movement, the importance of empathy among antislavery whites for the suffering slaves, and the impact of abolitionism upon the sectional struggle between the North and the South". Within a basic chronological framework the author also considers more general themes such as black abolitionists, feminism, and anti-slavery violence. For readers interested in American history.

This examination of a Quaker community in northern Virginia, between its first settlement in 1730 and the end of the Civil War, explores how an antislavery, pacifist, and equalitarian religious minority maintained its ideals and campaigned for social justice in a society that violated those values on a daily basis.

During the 1840s and 1850s, a dangerous ferment afflicted the North-South border region, pitting the slave states of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri against the free states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Aspects of this struggle--the underground railroad, enforcement of the fugitive slave laws, mob actions, and sectional politics--are well known as parts of other stories. Here, Stanley Harrold explores the border struggle itself, the dramatic incidents that comprised it, and its role in the complex dynamics leading to the Civil War.

Environmental protest - its causes and consequences - and the challenges of organizing to confront government and big business are the focus of this book, which brings to life the grassroots activism of southern Appalachia's rural citizens in the face of environmental threats to their communities. One of the first books to examine environmental activism case studies in the South, this insider's view is both academically rigorous and highly personal - its scholar-activist author is a member of Friends of Terrapin Creek, one of the groups featured in the book. Drawing upon qualitative data from oral histories and the papers of grassroots organizations, Suzanne Marshall gives voice to ordinary southerners who created activist networks in rural Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama - a region of southern Appalachia often ignored by scholars. These tales of rural empowerment offer a unique blend of ethnographic narrative and environmental policy history that never loses sight of the real people at the center of contested natural environments in the Appalachian South, an area that historically has suppressed organized environmental activism despite a host of ecological problems. Marshall provides insight into the links between national policy and regional political economy and their implications for local communities; she shows how, periodically, obstacles have been overcome. She illustrates how coalitions formed and examines the variety of political tactics and strategies used by local activists in their struggles against bureaucracy and private industry.

While many scholars have examined the slavery disputes in the halls of Congress, Subversives is the first history of practical abolitionism in the streets, homes, and places of business of the nation's capital. Historian Stanley Harrold looks beyond resolutions, platforms, and debates to describe how desperate African Americans, both free and slave, and sympathetic whites engaged in a dangerous day-to-day campaign to drive the ""peculiar institution"" out of Washington, D.C., and the Chesapeake region.That slavery was both vulnerable and vicious in Washington is at the heart of Harrold's study. Northern and foreign visitors were outraged by its existence in the seat of American government. For the South, Washington was a vital stronghold at the section's border. As economic changes caused slavery's decline in the Chesapeake and masters dismembered slave families by selling them South, local African Americans sought and received the support of a small number of whites eager to strike a blow against slavery in a strategic and very symbolic setting. Together they formed a subversive community that flourished in and about the city from the late 1820s through the mid-1860s. Risking beatings, mob violence, imprisonment, and death, these men and women distributed abolitionist literature, purchased the freedom of slaves, sued to prevent families from being separated, and aided escape efforts.Harrold overcomes the secrecy inherent to Washington's antislavery community to document its formation and activities with remarkable detail and -perception. He shows how slaveholders and their sympathisers fought to reinforce their hold on a system under attack and how the dissidents raised a radical challenge to the existing social order simply by engaging in interracial cooperation. While some subversives held power as politicians and journalists, most were obscure individuals. Black and white women played an important role.An illuminating study of a heretofore overlooked struggle, Subversives reveals a new dimension in resistance to slavery, nineteenth-century race relations, and the antebellum conflict over America's capital city.

Wayne Lee examines how a society shapes, directs, restrains, understands, and reacts to violence, with particular attention to riot and war in 18th-century North Carolina. He links several riots, the backcountry rebellion known as the Regulation, and the War for Independence by examining each as an act of public violence, rooted in cultural practice and shaped by collective notions of legitimacy. Beginning with public riot, Lee describes the ""rules of violence"" shared by rioters, authority, and the public at large and shows how those rules were observed or violated and what the consequences were for rioters and society. Moving to the larger-scale War of the Regulation, 1768-71, he examines the competing use of violence by settlers and authorities, each playing to a politicized public whose expectations of violence shaped the course of the movement from public protest to organized battlefield. He then shows how military action, like its civil counterpart, struggled for legitimacy in the Revolutionary War, the Tuscarora and Cherokee Wars, and the ""militias' war"" of 1780-82. For students of collective protest, Lee provides new case studies of violence in the colonial South and a more complete explanation for the course of the Regulation. He shows that such an event cannot be understood without addressing the forces shaping choices about violence. Similarly, he establishes a new paradigm for examining behavior in war, demanding careful consideration of individual incidents and the overlapping relationship between organized fighting bodies and the civilian population. He especially insists on a subtler understanding of ""military necessity,"" demonstrating that, in the wide landscape of violence that is war, people's choices are regulated by a broad set of cultural pressures, of which necessity is only one.

This book, the latest in the Seminar Studies in History series, examines the movement to abolish slavery in the US, from the origins of the movement in the eighteenth century through to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Books in this Seminar Studies in History series bridge the gap between textbook and specialist survey and consists of a brief "Introduction" and/or "Background" to the subject, valuable in bringing the reader up-to-speed on the area being examined, followed by a substantial and authoritative section of "Analysis" focusing on the main themes and issues. There is a succinct "Assessment" of the subject, a generous selection of "Documents" and a detailed bibliography. Stanley Harrold provides an accessible introduction to the subject, synthesizing the enormous amount of literature on the topic. American Abolitionists explores "the roles of slaves and free blacks in the movement, the importance of empathy among antislavery whites for the suffering slaves, and the impact of abolitionism upon the sectional struggle between the North and the South". Within a basic chronological framework the author also considers more general themes such as black abolitionists, feminism, and anti-slavery violence. For readers interested in American history.

The author of this work argues that if one is to understand who southerners were and are today, southern dissent of the 19th century must be understood and appreciated, since those years shaped southern ideas, customs, and values.

Within the American antislavery movement, abolitionists were distinct from others in the movement in advocating, on the basis of moral principle, the immediate emancipation of slaves and equal rights for black people. Instead of focusing on the "immediatists" as products of northern culture, as many previous historians have done, Stanley Harrold examines their involvement with antislavery action in the South--particularly in the region that bordered the free states. How, he asks, did antislavery action in the South help shape abolitionist beliefs and policies in the period leading up to the Civil War? Harrold explores the interaction of northern abolitionist, southern white emancipators, and southern black liberators in fostering a continuing antislavery focus on the South, and integrates southern antislavery action into an understanding of abolitionist reform culture. He discusses the impact of abolitionist missionaries, who preached an antislavery gospel to the enslaved as well as to the free. Harrold also offers an assessment of the impact of such activities on the coming of the Civil War and Reconstruction.