Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn and The Civil War | Page 4

The Union of
Abolitionists and
Emancipationists in
Civil War-Era
Massachusetts
By John Stauffer
Excerpted from Dr. Stauffer’s essay in the forthcoming Massachusetts
and the Civil War: The Commonwealth and National
Disunion, eds. Matthew Mason, Kathryn P. Viens, and Conrad
Edick Wright (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).
On April 14, 1865, editor William Lloyd Garrison,
Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, and other abolitionist
leaders visited Charleston, South Carolina, to commemorate
the end of the Civil War and of slavery. 1 Richmond had
fallen and Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox.
But for most Northerners, the symbolic end of the war had
occurred in February, when the Massachusetts 55th Colored
Regiment marched triumphantly into Charleston, the seat
of secession, singing “John Brown’s Body” as thousands of
freedmen and-women cheered them on.
In a speech at the Charleston Hotel later that day, Garrison
noted with irony how thirty years earlier, he had been
dragged through the streets of Boston and almost lynched
by a Democratic mob for declaring himself an abolitionist.
Now, in the marrow of the South, he was being treated as
a hero and prophet. He then referred to a recent meeting
with President Lincoln and said, “of one thing I feel sure,
either [Lincoln] has become a Garrisonian Abolitionist or
I have become a Lincoln Emancipationist, for I know that
we blend together, like kindred drops, into one.” 2
Garrison’s statement wonderfully encapsulates the social
revolution that accompanied the war, and the role that
abolitionists—especially those from Boston—played in it.
Everyone understood Garrison’s terms: “abolitionists” were
black and white radicals who had sought an immediate end
to slavery and advocated racial equality, at least in theory.
“Emancipationists,” or “antislavery advocates,” were liberals
who had sought to preserve the Union. For emancipationists,
the evil of slavery inhered less in what the institution
did to slaves than in what it did to the Union. They
advocated practical, legal, and, preferably, gradual solutions
to slavery. And, unlike the abolitionists, they opposed racial
equality and supported the idea of blacks’ colonizing another
country. 3
2 | Sweet Auburn
Members of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, Company A, at Mount
Auburn Cemetery for the dedication of the Colonel Robert Gould Shaw monument
on September 27, 2012. The 55th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry
mentioned in the article below was formed by Governor John Andrew in May of
1863 when there was an overflow of black recruits for the Mass 54th.
But the exigencies of war had transformed Lincoln and
other emancipationists into abolitionists, while Garrison
and other abolitionists had become emancipationists. Pre-
serving the Union required abolishing slavery, and vice-versa.
The categories of radical versus liberal, immediatist versus
gradualist, idealist versus realist, had broken down. 4
With the war, black and white abolitionists were transformed
from a tiny group of despised fanatics into respected prophets.
They were considered indispensable to the war effort and
the successes of Reconstruction, notably the constitutional
amendments that ended chattel slavery and guaranteed
citizenship, equal protection under the law, and unrestricted
male suffrage to blacks; the desegregation of federal post
offices, courts, public transportation, and visitors’ galleries
in Congress; and the extraordinary rise of black literacy and
black office-holders at local, state, and national levels. 5