American History Series: Abolition and Racial Equality

Have you ever wondered where the idea of racial equality came from? How did all this get started in the United States? Who destroyed the White Republic to write this into the Constitution?

The following excerpt comes from David Goldfield’s book America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation:

“The danger to the South and its institutions was no longer abstract, as the prayer of Ohio Republican congressman Joshua Giddings demonstrated: “I look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection in the South, when the black man … shall assert his freedom, and wage a war of extermination against his master; when the torch of the incendiary shall light up the towns and cities of the South, and blot out the last vestige of slavery. And yet I may not mock at their calamity, nor laugh when their fear cometh, yet I will hail it as the dawn of a political millennium.”

When the South seceded in 1861 to escape from the peril of “Black Republicanism,” it had in mind abolitionists like Rep. Joshua Giddings of Ohio. This is the sort of talk about “the dawn of a political millennium” that they were already dealing with in the 1850s. Giddings represented a region of Ohio known as the Western Reserve that was settled by New Englanders.

The following excerpt comes from Paul Goodman’s book Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality:

“Finally, let us urge upon you a total abandonment of prejudice against color,” abolitionist leaders instructed the thousands of rank and filers who had enlisted in the cause by 1837. Were slaves white skinned, they told them, no one would tolerate their bondage for an instant. White abolitionists who harbored color prejudice could never be efficient advocates of the cause because American slavery was racial in character and justification. “The abandonment of prejudice is required of us as a proof of our sincerity and consistency,” abolitionists affirmed. Seven years earlier, at the outset of his conversion to immediate abolition, William Lloyd Garrison had reached the same conclusion: “O that [my countrymen] might feel as keenly for a black skin as a white skin.” The black leader Samuel Cornish understood the significance of his people of the emergence of these white immediatists, despite their shortcomings:  “They have shown that God created all men EQUAL.”

In the 1830s, for the first time in American history an articulate and significant minority of Americans embraced racial equality as both a concept and a commitment, although it was an ideal far more difficult to live up to than to profess. Earlier proponents of racial equality were isolated voices that left few traces. This new development marked a change in the history of race relations in America – at a time when the dominant view among elites and common folk held that there was no future for free blacks in the United States …”

Goodman has done an excellent job of tracing the genealogy of anti-racism back to New England and its diaspora in the 1830s. “Immediatism” was a fanatical “ultraist” reform movement (teetotalism is another example that was often bundled with abolition) that grew out of the Finneyite revival in the Deep North during the Second Great Awakening.

“In the half-dozen years following the publication of Thoughts on African Colonization, white abolitionists, in the course of producing the founding texts of the movement, developed the most extensive defense of racial equality in American history. From Lydia Maria Child’s book length Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), to a fifteen-page pamphlet, Prejudice against Color (no date), published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, to Richard Hildreth’s powerful first antislavery novel, The Slave, The Memoir of Archy Moore (1836), abolitionists addressed the issue of prejudice and argued for immediate emancipation. Believing that race prejudice underpinned slavery, abolitionists committed themselves not just to emancipation, but, in the words of Article 2 of the New England Antislavery Society’s constitution in January 1832, “to improve the character and condition of the free people of color, to inform and correct public opinion in relation to their situation and rights and obtain from them equal civil and political rights and privileges with the whites.”

The only thing missing here is the modern term “racism” which abolitionists called “prejudice” or “race prejudice.” Otherwise, every aspect of the modern fanatical progressive worldview on race was in place by the 1830s: DZGD (the dogma of zero group differences), White guilt, the hysterical moralizing, the stereotype of the magic negro, “prejudice” as the explanation for black dysfunction, etc. The War Between the States itself was started by a Social Justice Warrior … John Brown.

“Correcting public opinion was no mean task. “Our prejudice against blacks is founded in sheer pride; and it originates in the circumstance that people of their color only, are universally allowed to be slaves,” Child argued. “We made slavery, and slavery made the prejudice.” Color phobia, abolitionists contended, is irrational, wicked, preposterous, and unmanly. It is contrary to natural rights and Christian teaching, which recognizes no distinctions based on color. Race prejudice, Elizur Wright Jr. exploded, is “a narrow, bitter, selfish, swinish absurdity.”

In the East, racial equality grew out of evangelical Protestantism and Enlightenment rights talk: the former emphasized spiritual equality while the later emphasized the equal rights of humanity.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

19 Comments

  1. I’d bet that Joshua Giddings and John Brown weren’t Jews. Or controlled by them, either.

    • Nope. Just your everyday universalist race-blind white Christians. They were race-blind before it became cool, though.

    • The vast majority of Jews in America are descended from immigrants that swamped the American system in the 1880s leading to the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. That means prior to 1880 there were some isolated and sometimes powerful Jews in America but modern organized Jewry as it exists in America today had its origins in the 1880s. By 1965 they were powerful enough to scrap the Immigration Act of 1924(Which gave most favored status to immigrants from Northern and Northwestern Europe instead of Eastern Europe where Jews came from and totally banned immigrants from Asia or Africa) and replace it with the Immigration Act of 1965 which opened America to the world.

  2. Nowhere in the Bible is the institution of slavery condemned. So the abolitionists’ argument that slavery was ‘anti-Christian’ was without merit.

    • Sure, if you take a sperg/autist/dialectic approach to it, which has zero effect on 98% of humanity.

      Rhetoric and, in effect, memes are far more effective at getting people to modify their behavior.

      No ten thousand word autistically reasoned essay is going to compare to the cultural and mental impact of “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

      Add in the fact that Christianity had the idea of “magic baptism” long before “magic dirt” or “magic citizenship” — that is, with an international god anyone who goes through the correct ritual becomes a “Christian” who is the “brother” of any other Christian, a tie which Jesus makes clear is far more important that the ties of blood or nation —

      “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

      Whites remained 80% pagan in spirit until the later 18th and early 19th century. That’s pretty much when they went 100% Christian at last — and Christianity was revealed as the Poz it always was.

      • There are literally a billion or more non-white Christians.

        As Tom Metzger said, “If your God made the non-whites, then why shouldn’t your daughters and sons make more of them.”

        Had World War Two in Europe been avoided, our future progeny would look back on Christianity in the way we view the gods of the Greeks and Romans.

        • Rather than debate Christianity’s merits or lack thereof, I have what should be a simple question to answer: With what do you replace Christianity?

          Trying to build a society on “reason” alone has led to nothing but bloody disaster. “Scientific socialism,” anyone? Regardless your viewpoint on religion, without some uniting higher purpose to drive and connect a people, civilizations fall.

          I promise this is not a trap where I turn around and tell you all how damned and stupid you are for not following the Jewish apprentice carpenter. I really want to know your opinions. My main purpose for being at this website is to learn. My political and cultural understanding has grown by the proverbial leaps and bounds, not only due to HW, but many of you. I’ll open up a bit to (hopefully) prove it: Believe it or not, I’ve recently come to see my faith as too limiting, in some ways. God and the creation process is real to me, but there’s more to it than the manmade box we’ve collectively put it in. Sorry if that’s too vague, but I’ve got to keep some things to myself, after all.

          • If our folk are the people that we believe them to be than Darwinian eugenics would be the antidote to the retrogressive evolution that our civilization is dying from.

            It’s sad to think that elephants, dolphins, and other intelligent higher mammals can conduct themselves in harmonious societies but we could not.

  3. Span is right that nowhere in the Bible is the institution of slavery condemned.

    The problem is the confusion of misunderstood Bible verses like ” One Blood”.

    The White race is from Adam which means Ruddy and White.

    The history channel did a series in where they said indirectly the non-White races are pre-Adamic. Wow, Awesome.

    Like most snakes, when Billy Graham used the Bible verse One Blood to support integration he stopped there and didn’t finish reading the rest of the verse which supports separation.

    • Mark >>The problem is the confusion of misunderstood Bible verses like ” One Blood”<<

      Mark,

      I am afraid you are right. You misunderstand the Bible completely!

      Please give me one antebellum SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN who held to your 'pre-adamic' theory

      If you give me anything written after the Civil War, I will dismiss it and you for being stupid.

      If you quote Josiah Nott or his ilk, who were not CHRISTIANS, I will dismiss them and you for being stupid.

      Your belief comes from the 17th Century Jew, Isaac de la Peyrere , and It's not CHRISTIAN.

      It's not SOUTHERN.

      Lose it.

      • There was no Antebellum SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN that could have known about pre-Adamic races because some of the lost books of the Bible were not found until the 20th century, like Enoch, Book of Giants and The Dead Sea Scrolls. Duhhh, hello, is anyboby home.

        After the flood, non-Adamic peoples who were not descended from Noah first appear in Genesis 15 and later the Epistles. Those missing books of the Bible like Enoch and the Book of Giants help to clarify these things. You can safely say that these books were not written after the Civil War Kneeling Catholic.

        • MARK>>>There was no Antebellum SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN that could have known about pre-Adamic races because some of the lost books of the Bible were not found until the 20th century, like Enoch, Book of Giants and The Dead Sea Scrolls. Duhhh, hello, is anyboby home.<<<

          Mark, Our early Church Fathers had those books and NONE of them came up with PRE-ADAMIC ideas or POLYGENISM. It took the Jew de la Peyrere to do that in the 17th CTY. He probably picked it up from Jewish Kabbalah

          http://www.koshertorah.com/PDF/shemitot.pdf

          There's nothing per se wrong with being a Jew's disciple, Mark. Many people worship Einstein and his ideas.

        • Mark >>>I never heard of de la Peyrere.
          I support http://www.christogenea.org<<&lt;

          Friend,

          You don't have to know his name to be using his stuff. ( I don't know the name of the guy who invented the steering wheel, NEVERTHELESS I am indebted to him )

          I hope I can make myself understood

          1. prior to the 19th century No one but Jewish Kabbalists taught pre-adamic legends. In the 1600s Peyere was a Jew who 'converted' to Calvinism and started peddling the idea to Christians. He got persecuted for it and eventually 'recanted'…or at least appeared to recant.

          2. NOW, pre-adamic legends are still being taught by Jewish Kabbalists AND your group.

          Do you see why it is only logical to conclude that those legends passed from Kabbalah to you?

  4. The War Between the States itself was started by a Social Justice Warrior … John Brown.

    John Brown was indeed the archetypal SJW, a fanatic and radical abolitionist, but I personally wouldn’t go so far as to say he started the WBTS. “Bloody Kansas” and all that notwithstanding. I wonder, have you ever read Origins of the Late War by George Lunt? Here is a short snippit from chapter III of his book:

    A very interesting letter of Professor S. B. Morse, of New York, giving the statements of General Wilson, a British officer, employed by the government in the arrangements for emancipation in the West Indies, has been before the public for some years. The statement of General Wilson was that Great Britain sought a footing, by this act of emancipation, from which to promote dissensions between the North and South, in regard to slavery, so as, by disunion, if possible, to promote her own manufacturing interests.

    The mother country had been stoking the fires of Northern abolitionism for a long time too, dating as far back in time as perhaps the War of 1812.

    I have The Thirty Years’ View, but have only read the first couple of chapters before I got distracted with more immediate business and “shelved” it to that end. I hope to get back to it soon.

    Excellent article again, btw!

  5. Any non-black race that has been exposed to negros and their demeanor will automatically understand that they are the least evolved of the tool making primates.

    Okay. So the Southerners had it right when it came to blacks, but what was their opinion of the jews? Well all know that it was the jews that riled up the blacks against Whites with grievance agitation.

    The communist “freedom riders ” were jews.

    Richard J. Daley the pro-segregationist mayor of Chicago knew the role jews played in stirring up anti-White dissent.

  6. So there’s a wide consensus here that self-hating Whites are as much of a problem, if not more, than others that hate Whites. Thinking about numbers, doesn’t that make our group even smaller than we thought? Trying to get to a favorable political solution that’s supported by a majority of voters then becomes almost impossible at this time. Wouldn’t a better idea be to focus on a self-help movement? Figuring out where to gather in hubs where we wouldn’t be isolated?

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