Neoabolitionist (or neo-abolitionist or new abolitionism) is a term used by some historians to refer to the heightened activity of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Later, the term began to be used among historians for those who led a re-evaluation of Reconstruction and its aftermath that focused on the significance of full citizenship and suffrage for African Americans.
Abolition refers to the moral and political position that advocated the abolition of slavery and granting of citizenship to African Americans in the United States. Following the American Revolution with its proposition of human equality, a number of slaveholders freed their slaves, or provided for their freedom in wills, in the early Republic period, 1783-1818. Slaveholders became alarmed about the existence of free Negroes in their societies and passed legislation in most Southern states to make it more difficult for owners to free slaves. In addition, states restricted residency, and sometimes work and other living conditions of free Negroes. Some states extended suffrage to free Negroes but withdrew it in decades before the Civil War.
Later in the 19th century, from 1840 through 1865, American proponents of abolition became more active. They condemned slavery as a sin and offense against human dignity. They demanded an end to plantation owners' profiting from slavery. Despite opponents' attempts to suppress individuals, the abolitionist movement became quite influential in the North. The abolitionist movement thus contributed to the Northern anti-slavery sentiment that was one of the factors involved in the Civil War.[1]
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Early 20th century historical treatments of the abolitionists and of the era of Reconstruction were negative. Historians like James G. Randall and Avery Craven labeled abolitionists as fanatics who caused a "needless war" that they argued should have been resolved by compromise. Most textbooks in the first half of the 20th century followed the early 20th century Dunning School narrative, later in the 20th century widely condemned by contemporary historians as deeply racist. It endorsed former white southern Confederates who called themselves "Redeemers". To regain political power, whites murdered and terrorized thousands of African Americans,[2] favored White Power after the Civil War ended to stop African Americans from voting, and to keep African-American people in inferior and unequal status.
After the Civil War, former abolitionists, especially African-American historians, such as Frederick Douglass, and much later, Harvard-trained historian W. E. B. Du Bois, presented positive views of the achievements of Reconstruction: for its advocacy of civil rights for African Americans and expanded suffrage to include poor whites. They held that the desire of Southern slave states to preserve the long-term future of slavery was the primary cause of Southern secession and the Civil War, and that the nation had a moral debt to abolish slavery, and to guarantee equal rights for former slaves, especially to guarantee voting rights.
W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP, observed that economic equality among black and white people would lead to equality for all. Fisk University historian Alrutheus Taylor described the period of Reconstruction in North Carolina and Tennessee in several books and articles. The Dunning School of white historians discounted the memoirs of John R. Lynch, one of the first African-American members of Congress during Reconstruction, in favor of their own narratives that claimed African Americans were incompetent to vote or to participate in government.
In the mid-1870s, the Redeemers (the Southern wing of the Democratic Party) overthrew the Republican coalition that had controlled the southern states for a brief period after 1867. The Redeemers replaced the civil rights reforms of Reconstruction with Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation in public places. Through murder, terror and procedural barriers,[2] the Redeemers curtailed or eliminated African-American voting rights. They replaced the short period when African Americans enjoyed some legal rights with segregation laws that reduced African-Americans civil rights socially, politically, and economically for the next 80 years or more. Public opinion, among northern whites, and most opinion by white scholars, accepted or applauded the Redeemers, but some clung to the abolitionist viewpoint. James McPherson[3] reports that 15 of 24 ex-abolitionists who wrote about Reconstruction called it a "qualified success."
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s had a major impact on historians. Howard Zinn identified the movement as a revival of the old in SNCC: The New Abolitionists.[4] Zinn popularized the term as it applied to civil rights activists, but he does not refer to historians as "neoabolitionist."
Beginning in the 1960s and strongly influenced by the Civil Rights movement, historians writing about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, emphasized the human advancement achieved by the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of those who had been enslaved. Eric Foner dated his major survey of Reconstruction from 1863 to emphasize the success of abolition (via the Emancipation Proclamation). Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988) emphasized the "unfinished" theme in its subtitle, explicitly connecting the 1860s to the second half of the 20th century when the issues of civil rights gained passage of federal legislation to overturn state discrimination. At no point in his many books and articles does Foner refer to himself or other historians as "neoabolitionists."
Many 20th century historians admired the original abolitionists and wrote about them (as did James McPherson and Martin Duberman[5]), echoing their moral values. Contemporary historians, including David W. Blight,[6] Michael Les Benedict,[7] James McPherson, John Hope Franklin,[8] and Steven Hahn[9] rejected the Dunning School notion that Reconstruction was overwhelmingly corrupt. They evaluated the postwar period as not more corrupt than many times of social change and turmoil in American history. They argued that Reconstruction had positive elements: most significantly, the enfranchisement of African Americans, both free men and former slaves; the extension of citizenship and civil rights to four million African Americans; and the introduction of public schools for both blacks and poor whites throughout the South where such schools generally had not existed. Franklin, for example, points to the founding of historically black universities Howard and Fisk as two major successes of Reconstruction.
Contemporary historians observed that depriving African Americans of suffrage and civil rights was a terrible form of corruption and violation of tenets of representative government.
The term Neoabolition or neo-abolitionist is considered by the historian Harvard Sitkoff to sometimes be a derisive term.[14]