Joaquim Nabuco

The struggle to abolish slavery was a genuine revolution, not merely a reform movement: such is the bold thesis of this interpretive history of the Abolitionist movement by a senior scholar of the black experience in America. Herbert Aptheker shows how the opposition to slavery and racism emerged through the Civil War from the 1820s as a tight organization of "professional revolutionaries," dedicated to nothing less than the confiscation of billions of dollars worth of private property in the form of slaves. These revolutionaries were well aware that by thus destroying the economic basis of ruling class power, they invoked a revolution in the established political, social, and moral order. This fresh appraisal of Abolitionism treats in full the essential role that blacks played in their own liberation. It shows how other social movements of the nineteenth century, among them the labor movement and the push for women's suffrage, found in the struggle against slavery, and throws new light on the parallels between American Abolitionism and the international revolutionary ferment of the age. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Aptheker reexamines the parts played by such individuals as Wendell Phillips, Benjamin Lundy, Jefferson Davis, John Brown, Nat Turner, and William Lloyd Garrison in the successes and failures of the Abolitionist movement. -- from dust jacket.