Abolition and Anti-slavery: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic

摘要

The long saga of slavery and its abolition is one of the best studied and most disputed subjects in American history. But one wonders how important the abolition movement was in bringing slavery to an end. To explore that, I feel a great need for some context before we discuss the work in hand - in particular an examination of what the historians have said about it. For Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, writing in American Negro Slavery (1918), slavery was a much needed "civilising" force for black people. It offered them good conditions, necessary social controls and a broadly constructive relationship with whites. But it was an economic failure and headed for collapse even without abolition. As a southerner (born in 1877 of a plantation mother), Phillips' bias comes as no surprise. Ellis Merton Coulter writing in the 1950s was a frank apologist for the unreconstructed south: for secession, segregation and the whole apparatus of Jim Crow. Neither saw the abolitionists as a force for good.