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The American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
Extract
In his autobiography, Cheerful Yesterdays, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, looking back on the long crusade that ended with the abolition of Negro bondage in the United States, declared: “The anti-slavery movement was not strongest in the educated classes, but was primarily a people's movement, based on the simplest human instincts and far stronger … in the factories and shoe-shops than in the pulpits and colleges.” Few people have challenged this statement, which Higginson made in 1898; probably because the scarcity of material on the subject has prevented a thorough examination of all its implications, and especially of the main argument that the laboring man was the real force behind the antislavery crusade.Yet there is sufficient evidence to throw serious doubt upon the accuracy of Higginson's statement, evidence which reveals that workers in shops and factories often exhibited an almost callous unconcern for the entire crusade.
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References
1 Higginson, Thomas W., Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1898), 115.Google Scholar
2 Hine, Lucius A., quoted in the National Era, August 21, 1851.Google Scholar
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4 Ibid., January 8, 1831.
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7 Young America, quoted in National Era, March 2, 1848. See also Young America, January 23, 1847, quoted in ibid., March 11, 1847.
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11 Workingman's Advocate, June 22, July 6, 1844.
12 New York Weekly Tribune, June 20, 1845. For similar expressions of this and the previous statement made by George Henry Evans see also Liberator, September 4, 1846; Young America, quoted in National Era, March 11, 1847, March 2, 1848; Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1935), 21Google Scholar; Schlueter, Hermann, Lincoln, Labor, and Slavery (New York: Socialist Literature Company, 1913), 60, 62, 64, 67Google Scholar; Commons, , “Horace Greeley and the Working Class Origins of the Republican Party,” Political Science Quarterly, XXIV 1909), 479Google Scholar; Frothingham, Octavius, Gerrit Smith (New York, 1878), 346–347.Google Scholar
13 Quoted in Schlueter, Lincoln, Labor, and Slavery, 72–73; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 23.
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15 Schlueter, Lincoln, Labor, and Slavery, 39.
16 Working Men's Advocate, November 21, 1835.
17 Liberator, September 4, 1846.
18 George E. McNeill (ed.), The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today (Boston, 1887), 107.
19 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 23.
20 See Schlueter, Lincoln, Labor, and Slavery, 77.
21 Liberator, September S, 1845; see also ibid., June 6, 1845.
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23 Young America, January 23, 1847, quoted in National Era, February 11, 1847.
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25 Young America,, quoted in National Era. March 2, 1848.
26 See New York Weekly Tribunc, October 7, 1848; Buffalo Republic, October 3, 1848.
27 Cincinnati Daily Unionist, February 1, 1854.
28 Ibid., March 1, 1854; see also National Era, March 9, 1854.
29 New York Weekly Tribune, October 26, 1850.
30 See Schlueter, Lincoln, Labor, and Slavery, 82.
31 Cole, Arthur C., Lincoln's “House Divided” Speech (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1923), 30.Google ScholarSee also Carlton, Frank T., Organized Labor in American History (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1920), 147.Google Scholar
32 Ibid., 148.
33 See the New York Weekly Tribune, August 24, 1860.
34 See ibid., October 15, 1845; June 19, 1846; June 23, 1847; July 1, 1848; June 19, 1850; June 11, 1851; June 3, 1852; June 2, 1853; June 9, 1854; June 8, 1855; June 7, 1856.
35 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 25–26.