Finally, Sinha develops her point about continuity to transcend the traditional barriers between political and social history. Sinha extends her consideration of capitalism and class consciousness into her description of the grassroots nature of the movement. Sinha starts by dividing the history of emancipation into two large “waves.” The first begins with the Revolution and extends until the 1820s. She shares the stories of slaves in New England who used their judicial and civil rights to initiate and enforce emancipation, showing that of 28 freedom suits in Massachusetts during the colonial and revolutionary period, only one was unsuccessful (p. 67). Just about the best that Garrison could do to assist him was to publish Easton’s treatise and write a celebratory eulogy in The Liberator after his death. In short, The Slave's Cause is an act of recovery, rescuing from obscurity a host of characters. Slavery: A World History: Milton Meltzer; The Slaves Cause: A History of Abolition: Manisha Sinha; Learn More: North and South. Another continuity Sinha traces is the radical nature of the movement. Minutes of the Proceedings of the Fourteenth American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and Improving the Condition of the African Race: Assembled at Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1816), 30–32; Minutes of the Proceedings of the Fifteenth American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and Improving the Condition of the African Race: Assembled at Philadelphia (Philadelphia, … Throughout the book Sinha cites secondary works of relevance in the footnotes, even after claiming neglect in the text. In Pennsylvania, the fate of an enslaved woman named Dinah Nevil encouraged the formation of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, one of the oldest and most revered antislavery organizations in the world, and blacks pushed for the adoption of the state’s emancipation law. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. They were barred from churches, schools, workshops and cemeteries, indeed, any institution white people claimed as their own. Electronic reproduction. I doubt that a reading lay public would not have at least heard of William Lloyd Garrison, the pre-eminent American abolitionist. Further, Sinha shows that William Lloyd Garrison did not resist involvement with politics to the extent that some historians have assumed. Format E-Book Published ©2016 New Haven : Yale University Press, [2016] Description 1 online resource. It was this arena of the black struggle and the work of blacks in the South that ultimately turned the American Civil War into a war for freedom. Abolition established the principles and rhetoric, while setting the strategies and tactics, that have guided all subsequent reform movements — even those that have stood opposed to one another like prohibitionism and antiprohibitionism, or pro- and anti-abortion rights. The book was featured as the Editor’s Choice of the New York Times Book Review. Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause is a synthetic work that traces the long trajectory of the anti-slavery movement in the United States and places it into an international context. She wrote The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and recently featured in The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Manisha Sinha, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and author of the award-winning book The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, takes us through the early American origins of the the abolition movement. This book is a comprehensive new history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. In the northern states, which saw gradual emancipation in the years immediately following the American War of Independence, slaves and white abolitionists oversaw the process and fought to prevent abuse and backsliding (p. 66). Slave rebellions, I argue were not just episodic in the history of abolition but shaped its discourse and trajectory. In today’s post, Rebecca Brenner, a PhD candidate in the Department of History at American University, interviews Manisha Sinha on her new book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, which was recently published by Yale University Press. Garrison noted that black people worked “against wind and tide,” and white abolitionists joined the assault on inequality. Countering the traditional argument that the movement radicalized as time wore on, she contends that it was a radical movement all along, particularly when considered through the experiences of black abolitionists. Sinha treats these divisions fully and fairly, although she plays down Frederick Douglass’s horrendous break with Garrison. As I argue in my ‘Coming of age: the historiography of black abolitionism’ in John Stauffer and Timothy Patrick McCarthy’s Prophets of Protest (1), also cited in my book, black abolitionists themselves wrote about their roles in the abolition movement and one of the founding fathers of African American history, Benjamin Quarles wrote the classic work on black abolition in 1969! Northern emancipation was glacially slow, but in time the region became committed to wage labor. Similarly, though she wants to rescue black figures and their stories from oblivion, she is a generation too late, as historians have already rescued most of them. Let me take care of a few quibbles at the outset and address her more substantial criticism at greater length. a synthetic work that traces the long trajectory of the anti-slavery movement in the United States and places it into an international context. For this reason alone it will long serve as an important reference tool. She continues: trans-Atlantic slavery was an interracial affair, and without the resistance of African slaves … Throughout the long struggle against slavery, Sinha says that with a few exceptions, black people were always a step ahead of their white compatriots in making the case for black freedom. Dr. Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. Black abolitionists transformed their struggle against slavery into a movement against racial discrimination. One of the main continuities of the anti-slavery movement was its interracial nature. She traces the debate over the relationship between slavery and the Constitution to Absalom Jones, who considered and discussed the issue well before the rise of political abolitionism. She adds that they pioneered in the development of modern concepts of human rights. In a brief epilogue, Sinha argues for many lessons, at least for those readers on the left, and the mention of names like Du Bois and Debs reflect back on the road she has traveled. Although women were abolition’s most effective representatives and the most numerous foot soldiers, sharp differences over their place within the movement persisted. An important arena for black leadership, according to Sinha, was in the South, where it went underground and was kept alive by slave rebels and fugitives who cultivated alliances with free blacks and a few whites (p. 144). It is written in a manner that ought to be accessible to a broader audience outside academia but it is very much a work of historical scholarship. “The history of abolition begins with those who resisted slavery at its inception,” writes Sinha (Univ. This focus on the critiques of capitalism goes well with recent works on the connection between slavery and capitalism, most notably Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. It illuminates a variety of approaches to social activism, rebellions, resistance, rivalries, triumphs, debacles and myths, emphasizing the centrality, creativity and perseverance of African American agency in liberation efforts. She tells us that “The Slave’s Cause” can best be appreciated as an interpretation of abolition’s long history, though the seemingly endless detail presented over the course of nearly 600 pages of text and another 100-plus pages of notes frustrates her effort to present a clear alternative narrative to the familiar one. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition Longlist, National Book Awards 2016 for Nonfiction. Sinha charts antislavery movements from the mid-1700s through the American Revolution, the emancipation of slaves in Britain and France and America’s political battles leading to the Civil War. Vermont blacks forced state leaders to ban slavery in what became the state constitution and blacks in Massachusetts demanded citizenship as well as freedom. Abolitionist ideology, she explains, ‘exposed northern complicity in upholding slavery, connected the sufferings of slaves to national wealth, and developed a discourse of human rights’ (p. 246). While some historians have seen blacks as ‘objects of white benevolence’ during this period, blacks and whites saw each other as ‘worthy allies,’ with connections to the black community shaping abolitionist society activities (p. 121). There is still important work to be done to expand on their stories, but there is no need to ignore the body of research and literature that already exists. (For one example, see footnote seven on p. She argues that the black freedom petitions of the Revolutionary Era called for reparations in addition to freedom and adds that black institutional independence encouraged early black abolitionists to create ‘a radical antislavery rhetoric that would flower in the antebellum interracial abolition movement’ (p. 144). I am afraid the ‘straw men’ she accuses me of constructing are visible only to her. Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought. Manisha Sinha, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is one of those historians who are trying to connect the war against slavery to other liberation movements. The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition , Manisha … Indeed, she concludes that ‘writers of African descent were among the first to wrestle with the problems of race and slavery in the modern West’ (p. 9) and that their early works discredited ‘the racist logic that dehumanized Africans as slave property’ (p. 26). Overview. The two central arguments of the book, that slave resistance lay at the heart of the abolition movement and that abolition was defined by its radical internationalism, are fully developed there. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave's cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe." I would like to thank Beverly Tomek for her review of my book, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, and the editors of Reviews in History for inviting me to respond to it. The Slave’s Cause is valuable for a number of reasons. ISBN 9780300181371 Yale University Press . Embracing the Declaration of Independence and the notion that all were equal in the sight of God, the opponents of slavery put American slaveholders, as Americans and as Christians, on the defensive, deeming them hypocrites. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is her discussion of Garrison’s relationship with politics and political anti-slavery, as she makes a compelling argument that his ideas must be placed within the overall context of political anti-slavery and considered through his engagement with that movement. It would have been better had she engaged the secondary literature clearly and directly in the text rather than putting herself in the strange position of using the work of other historians while discounting their existence. Her multiple award winning second book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition brought me back to her. Many of them have produced admirable local studies of African-American community activism, which they do not see as a part of the abolition movement. In one of her most innovative points, she cites X signatures to develop her claim that early black abolitionism was a community-wide movement that bridged class boundaries (p. 140). Most disappointing is Tomek’s failure to fully engage with the larger second half of the book. Some splits were over matters of religion, and some over Garrison’s peculiar perfectionist ethos and notions of nonresistance. Donate Now. She also points out that the demands of the American Convention of Abolition Societies were very similar to those of immediate abolitionists. Also, she compares Anthony Benezet to William Lloyd Garrison well before there is any discussion of Garrison (p. 20). Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. She cites Federalist concerns over what would later be labeled ‘Slave Power’, tracing their argument that ‘slaveholders, not slaves, constituted the gravest threat to the Republic’ (p. 109). In fact, most black activists self-identified as abolitionists and would probably be mortified to be read out of the movement. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave's cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. Introduction: The Radical Tradition of Abolition. For British audiences in particular, the book’s argument that abolitionists were more often critics of early capitalism and western imperialism rather than stalking horses of both might be of some interest. “Hardly any doors but those of our state prisons, were open to our colored brethren,” Garrison remarked. Read description. “The history of abolition is an integrated story even though it is not usually told in that manner,” Sinha told her audience in the Hall of Graduate Studies. In this densely researched work, Manisha Sinha offers not only a synthesis of American antislavery but a compelling interpretation of a "hundred-year drama in law, politics, literature, and on-the-ground activism" (2). The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. She points out that the first anti-slavery writing was produced in West Africa and that the story of the rise of abolition was an interracial one from the beginning. Just fill in your details. Finally, Tomek misses my attempt to cast African-American abolitionists as not just grassroots activists but as ideologues and tacticians of the movement, who produced sophisticated theoretical rebuttals to scientific racism and the pro-slavery argument. Cloth, $37.50. - Field - 2018 - The Journal of American Culture - Wiley Online Library. The result is an outstanding reference book that highlights the … After describing this connection, Sinha traces an anti-capitalist strain in anti-slavery into the Revolutionary period and argues that, in their quest to end the slave trade, black abolitionists in the early 1800s ‘fashioned a radical critique of slavery and early capitalism’ (p. 151). One other issue lies in Sinha’s use of straw man arguments that interrupt her narrative and detract from the importance of the synthetic nature of her story. This book is not a synthesis per se as it is based on extensive primary research and challenges much of the conventional historical wisdom on the abolition movement. This continuity has become increasingly obvious in the studies produced over the past decade, and Sinha builds upon a host of primary and secondary sources to show readers that, while scholars may continue to divide the movement in broad periods, the issues of each of those periods blended from one into another as the movement advanced. Further, she claims that African Americans’ struggle for the vote and against segregation and racial violence ‘is often forgotten in the history of abolition’ (p. 299). According to Sinha, abolition also led reformers to criticize imperialism. "Lucidly written, compellingly argued and based on exhaustive scholarship, The Slave's Cause captures the myriad aspects of this diverse and far-ranging movement and will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era. Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history. She also points to the importance of the joint efforts between black Americans and abolitionists who worked through the courts to help blacks gain freedom and education. Primarily, it offers both the general reader and the specialist a literal catalogue of anti-slavery activists and their major writings – a basic who’s who of the movement from the colonial period to the Reconstruction Era. The source of their concern, as Sinha underlines, derived from the pervasive racial discrimination all black people experienced. She concludes that the failure to do away with racial barriers and ensure equality for all in the United States was not the fault of abolitionists. Garrison himself declared that The Liberator did not belong to whites — “They do not sustain it.” Rather, people of color made it theirs — “It is their organ.”. Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition presents a revolutionary narrative that gives black activism long overdue acknowledgment. This job began as soon as the Constitution was ratified and Sinha describes the role of Federalists in laying the groundwork for political arguments that would later be employed by Whigs and Republicans in their political fight against slavery. Perhaps nowhere was the distance between black and white abolitionists greater than on the subject of race itself. Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition presents a revolutionary narrative that gives black activism long overdue acknowledgment. Sinha’s footnotes show an awareness of many of these works. Unfortunately, however, those who opposed equality won many battles and the overall war is still being fought. Nonetheless, she has given us a full history of the men and women who truly made us free. The diverse responses to the pain of discrimination suggest some of the strains within the antislavery movement, and as Sinha shows, the history of abolition, like most reform movements, is often a story of fragmentation and division. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha Yale University Press, 2016, 784 pp. Similarly, she sometimes assumes too much prior knowledge of her readers. Quick Facts . Civil War Facts. Secondly, it restores abolitionists’ reputations as radicals who dared to fight the prevailing system, even if some of their tactics and conclusions collided not just with the mainstream worldview of the time but also with the ideas of other reformers. As Sinha argues in one of the most original sections of “The Slave’s Cause,” “black abolitionists produced the first full-blown analyses of American racism,” beginning with a treatise by the Rev. Even so, ‘the history of abolition is an ideal test case of how radical social movements generate energies of political change’ (p. 4). Although, as Tomek briefly points out, Garrison is often caricatured as an unreasonable fanatic in historiography and popular culture. Of course, personality clashes were frequent. It provides a catalogue of antislavery figures, organizations, and publications and will likely serve as a valuable go-to reference work for years to come. I would beg to disagree with Tomek’s conclusion that I ‘claim originality’ while relying on secondary literature. At the same time, Sinha erases needless color lines, revealing the comprehensive nature of abolitionism. 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