Book Description

During the sixty years preceding the Civil War, violent means were often used to combat slavery in the United States. In this collection of essays, ten scholars explore the circumstances in which such violence arose, the aims of those responsible for it, and its impact on events of the day. Reflecting a variety of perspectives and approaches, this is the first book devoted exclusively to this important subject. Previous studies have concentrated on how white, northeastern, professedly nonviolent abolitionists sometimes endorsed or engaged in forceful action against slavery. This volume goes beyond that emphasis to examine the role of antislavery violence in a variety of regional, racial, ideological, and chronological contexts. Its broad focus includes southern slave rebels, antislavery women in Kansas, violent slave rescuers in Ohio, and northern antislavery politicians. Antislavery Violence challenges the notion that violence within the antislavery movement was unusual prior to the 1850s, showing that such violence in fact lay deep in American history and culture. It establishes that antislavery violence served to unite slavery's black and white enemies and reveals how antebellum concepts of gender played a role in the justification of or participation in such violence. Finally, by stressing the role of violence within the antislavery movement, the collection encourages a fresh appreciation of that movement as a major precursor to the much more violent Civil War. Seeking neither to condemn nor to glorify acts of political violence against slavery, these essays reveal them as a product of a particular time, culture, intellectual framework, and political environment. The book will challenge readers to ponder the subtlety, ambiguity, distaste, and exaltation with which Americans living a century and a half ago wrestled with the issue of reform through violent means. The Editors: John R. McKivigan is Mary O'Brien Gibson Professor of History at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. He is the author of The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches.Stanley Harrold is professor of history at South Carolina State University and the author of The Abolitionists and the South.