Motivation

Students should read the following contrasting viewpoints of the abolitionists by historians James Ford Rhodes and Avery Craven. Students can share their explanations of these viewpoints and ascertain the historical issue or question being raised by these historians.

“Abolitionism was an organized moral crusade centered in New England . . . to rid the nation of the sin of slavery. But the slaveholders, refusing to be moved by moral suasion and the principles if ‘true religion,’ made compromise impossible. Slavery, at war with the laws of God and nature, thus perished by the sword.”
----- James Ford Rhodes, Lectures on the American Civil War, New York: Macmillan, 1913

“The abolitionists were irresponsible fanatics who bear the responsibility for the secession of the South and the outbreak of war in 1861. By their unceasing opposition to ‘sin’ and their unyielding attacks on the morals of slaveholders, the abolitionists succeeded only in convincing most Northerners that the South was a dangerous ‘slave power’ bent on destroying the American dream . . . . They created a psychological climate, North and South, where fear, hatred, and hysteria rather than reason prevailed. Civil War was then in the making.”
----- Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1957

As an additional motivation, ask students to describe an issue or a situation today in which they would be eager and willing to participate in a protest activity and how this type of protest might affect the situation.

Procedure

Students should read and discuss the significance of the following excerpts (for a pdf version of these document excerpts, click here). Teachers can decide whether the initial reading and discussion should be in small groups or general class discussion. Following these document excerpts there is a menu of thought-provoking questions to stimulate student discussion on the role and impact of the abolitionist movement.

Document A:

“I believe when two races come together which have different origins, colors, and physical and intellectual characteristics, that slavery is instead of an evil, a good – a positive good . . . There is and has always been, in an advanced state of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital. Slavery exempts Southern society from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict. This explains why the political condition of the slaveholding states has been so much more stable and quiet than that of the North.”
----- John C. Calhoun, southern senator, February 6, 1837

Document B:

“The laboring classes enjoy more material comfort, are better fed, clothed and housed as slaves than as freemen. The statistics of crime demonstrate that the moral superiority of the slave over the free laborer is still greater . . . . There never can be among slaves a class so degraded as is found about the wharves and suburbs of cities. The master requires and enforces ordinary morality and industry. How slavery could degrade men lower than universal liberty has done, it is hard to conceive . . . . The free laborer rarely has a house and home of his own; he is insecure of employment . . . .”
----- George Fitzhugh, author, Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Society (1854)

Document C:

“The slaves in the United States are treated with barbarous inhumanity; that they are overworked, underfed, wretchedly clad and lodged, and have insufficient sleep; . . . that they are frequently flogged with terrible severity; . . . their flesh branded with red hot irons; that they are maimed, mutilated and burned to death over slow fires. . . . We will establish all these facts by the testimony of scores and hundreds of eye witnesses. . . . We shall show, not merely that such deeds are committed, but that they are frequent . . . not in one of the slave states, but in all of them.”
----- Theodore D. Weld, Slavery As It Is (1839)

Document D:

“Slavery is sin before God. Individually, or as political communities, men have no more right to enact slavery, than they have to enact murder or blasphemy, or incest or adultery.”
----- James G. Birney in 1835, Liberty Party presidential candidate