Booknotes: The Abolitionist Civil War

New Arrival:

• The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union by Frank J. Cirillo (LSU Press, 2023).

Nineteenth-century abolitionism in the United States operated under two general stripes: immediate and gradual. The more radical of the two sub-groups, immediatists sought instant freedom and civil rights for enslaved persons while gradualists, no less committed to the same end, nevertheless deemed it safer, more broadly acceptable, and far less economically, socially, and politically disruptive to achieve emancipation across a more measured time scale.

Though immediatists failed to achieve broad support (and drew much opposition) across the country throughout the antebellum period, the prospects of a long Civil War provided them with a golden opportunity to press their cherished goals upon a more amenable northern body politic.

From the description: "The astonishing transformation of the abolitionist movement during the Civil War proved enormously consequential both for the cause of abolitionism and for the nation at large." Focused on that process, Frank Cirillo’s The Abolitionist Civil War "explores how immediate abolitionists contorted their arguments and clashed with each other as they labored over the course of the conflict to create a more perfect Union." Though emancipation was successfully achieved during the war and secured through constitutional amendment, the other principal goal of the immediatists, full civil rights for blacks, would be long deferred.

As outlined in Cirillo's introduction, the book explores three central themes. One, it "extends the story of immediatism deep into the Civil War and beyond, fleshing out its true nature as a morally nationalistic, ideologically multifarious, and politically dynamic movement." Two, it "demonstrates how interventionists during the first half of the war helped bring about a Union policy of military emancipation that had seemed far from inevitable." Finally, the study "explores the unintended but disastrous repercussions of their intervention during the second half of the war, as abolitionism stunted its power to secure further, lasting change beyond formal emancipation" (pg. 4).