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Abolition in the Age of Obama

What is abolitionism? Abolitionism, today, might allude to everything from “the prison industrial complex” to “climate change.” Despite the different domains in which the term is deployed, of course it still refers explicitly to the historical struggle against slavery. Writing in the late 1960s, at the peak of the civil rights movement, about the context for the “freedom struggle” of his time, Benjamin Quarles called abolitionism “the most important and revolutionary reform in our country’s past” (vii). More recent accounts of the movement have helped to expand the history of abolitionism. According to Richard S. Newman, “Abolitionism was born with the American republic” and “did not fade until the nation’s near-death experience of the Civil War” (2). While historians disagree over when (and where) abolitionism began, they generally agree about its end—Emancipation—and typically focus on these 89 years from the Revolution to the Civil War. If that history has expanded, most significantly through the work of historian David Brion Davis, its objective has remained constant: to understand how slavery was brought to an end. Abolitionism’s move beyond history into an ongoing and ever-changing discourse has raised its profile, Andrew Delbanco suggests, not just among Americanists but Americans. “If we construe abolition in this wider sense . . . what might it tell us about our country?” (3). For Delbanco, abolitionism is a state of mind. Abolitionism is a state of mind, synonymous with being American, a belief in the rightness of a cause no matter the cost. Not all of us (Americans and Americanists) subscribe to such a political program, but we inevitably admire those who do. Still, the association between abolitionism and the end of slavery is what gives the movement such a good rap. Rather than ask, “Who were the Abolitionists?” as Delbanco does at the outset of his book, The Abolitionist Imagination (2012), it might make more sense