The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

Abstract

This important book is poised to become the definitive general history of U.S. abolitionism for decades to come. Exhaustive research, dramatic writing, and ambitiously full coverage make The Slave's Cause unlikely to be surpassed in scholarship. At the same time, the interpretations offered explicitly early and late in the book and implicitly in the vivid storytelling throughout reflect the particular concerns of our scholarly generation. The book is a triumph, but the times, in historiography and in politics, that produced it lend themselves to sharply defining some interpretive issues and to eliding others. Two striking interpretive lines deserve particular foregrounding. The first, drawing on rich Marxist and leftist black nationalist scholarship so well-represented at the University of Massachusetts, where Manisha Sinha teaches, places black people at the center of the plot of abolition. Excellent coverage of humanitarianism, Christianity, and reform frame matters, but the insistence on African American self-activity changes how The Slave's Cause considers those matters. Barely two dozen lines into the book, Sinha forthrightly declares, “Slave resistance, not bourgeois liberalism, lay at the heart of the abolition movement.” (p. 1).

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