Abolitionism and American Politics and Government

These essays demonstrate that support for a more aggressive battle against slavery had been growing for a number of decades before finding broad support among abolitionists in the 1850s. Ultimately the political and more militant wings of abolitionism converged after the start of the Civil War, when abolitionists worked to prod Abraham Lincoln into enlisting blacks in the Union army and adopting emancipation as one of the North's war goals.