The slave's cause : a history of abolition / Manisha Sinha.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 593-731) and index.

List of abbreviations -- Introduction: The radical tradition of abolition -- Prophets without honor -- Revolutionary antislavery in Black and White -- The long northern emancipation -- The Anglo-American abolition movement -- Black abolitionists in the slaveholding republic -- The neglected period of antislavery -- Interracial immediatism -- Abolition emergent -- The woman question -- The Black man's burden -- The abolitionist international -- Slave resistance -- Fugitive slave abolitionism -- The politics of abolition -- Revolutionary abolitionism -- Abolition war -- Epilogue: The abolitionist origins of American democracy.

Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave's cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe.

Frederick Douglass Book Prize, 2017

NLJCols20082021