"The Day of Sainthood Has Passed": American Abolitionists and the Golden Moment of the Civil War, 1861-1865

This project explores the divisions among American abolitionists over whether or not to support the Lincoln Administration and the Union war effort during the Civil War. The choices that longtime reformers made in confronting the changed landscape of wartime America, and the series of schisms within the movement that ensued, helps to explain how the Union war achieved both so much and so little in terms of black social and political rights.