History of the American Abolitionist Movement – serie

Several of this volume's essays trace the origins of the modern immediate abolitionist campaign to the ideological ferment of the Age of Enlightenment followed by the intellectual reorientation produced by Romanticism. New perspectives on the movement's origins enable modern scholars to rebut charges that abolitionist motivation was a product of status anxiety or of an even deeper form of psychological disorder

This volume presents key published articles on the history of the American abolitionist movement's attempt to convert the nation's religious institutions into allies in the battle for emancipation. As this volume's essays describe, many abolitionists persisted in attempting to induce the churches to take a higher antislavery stand. Their activities helped foment the sectional schism of a number of the nation's leading denominations in the decades prior to the Civil War.

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.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.