History/Academia/Religion/Culture/Politics/Jazz
Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

In 1842, William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery Boston abolitionist, began to call for the dissolution of the United States, a nation hopelessly corrupted by slavery. In 1844, the American Anti-Slavery Society adopted the principle of “no union with slaveholders” as its motto. In 1861, the union would be dissolved, but not in the way that Garrisonians had desired.

Garrison’s disunionism can be placed in a national tradition of secessionist thought that culminated in civil war, but Garrisonian thinking about disunion also had transnational sources. Calls for disunion were influenced by the language of Daniel O’Connell’s transatlantic movement for Irish Repeal, which peaked in 1843. The coincidence of the Repeal campaign with the appearance of Garrisonian disunionism was not accidental. In the early 1840s, many Garrisonians forged personal ties with a coterie of Irish reformers, some of whom, like Dublin merchant James Haughton, were devoted Repealers. They advocated a “repeal of the union” that joined Ireland to the United Kingdom, while Garrison called for a “repeal of the union” between North and South. In 1842, he declared himself “both an Irish Repealer and an American Repealer,” and Wendell Phillips, another Garrisonian, referred to disunionism as “our repeal” in private correspondence.

Historians cannot understand the timing and texture of Garrisonians’ disunionism without understanding their ties with Irish reformers. Likewise, even the quintessentially American question of whether divided houses can stand was part of wider transatlantic debates in the early nineteenth century, which included Irish Repealers, European liberals, and American abolitionists.

The formal session is a kind of loathsome ritual of humanities and social science academia, a lacerating gesture of masochism. Three, sometimes four, panelists read dully through a pre-written paper. Every once in a great while, one of them has actually written a shorter version of the paper designed to be read aloud, that has some vague hint of a performative gloss to it. Mostly though presenters just put red lines through paragraphs they want to skip, rush through the end, make amendations on the fly, read prose intended for formal publication.

In 1842, Garrisonian abolitionists, who took their name from the fiery editor of the Boston Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, began to call publicly for the dissolution of the United States. The Union, they concluded, was nothing but a sword and a shield for slavery; the Constitution was a proslavery instrument. And as long as Northerners remained in a Union that contained slaveholders, warned Garrison and his supporters, they would bear guilt for the national sin of slavery. Coming out of the Union was the only way to stay innocent and the only way to abolish slavery. In a letter to the Liberator in April 1842, radical abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright summed up this view: “We ought to have laid before the slaveholders, long ago, this alternative. You must abolish slavery, or we shall dissolve the Union.” [1]

In reality, Garrisonians had laid that alternative before the South before, but it was not until the spring of 1842 that the Liberator began to propose disunionism as the “one standard” for dividing “genuine friends of liberty” from false ones. The week before printing Wright’s letter, William Lloyd Garrison proposed that disunion be made the first order of business at the next meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In May, he began printing a new slogan in capital letters above his editorials, calling for “A REPEAL OF THE UNION BETWEEN NORTHERN LIBERTY AND SOUTHERN SLAVERY.” Two years later, Garrisonians officially endorsed a more concise motto: “No Union with Slaveholders!” And for the rest of the antebellum period, until the firing of shots on Fort Sumter in 1861 actually did dissolve the Union, disunionism would be the Garrisonians’ calling card. [2]

In this talk I want to raise two questions about disunionism and then suggest how taking a transnational perspective on the era of the American Civil War might help us answer them. The first question I want to ask is about timing. Portents of disunion predated Garrisonians’ adoption of the slogan, “No Union with Slaveholders,” but why was it not until 1842 that Garrisonians began making that demand their rallying cry? Part of the answer is that the outlook for abolition looked especially grim in 1842: President John Tyler seemed to support plans for the annexation of Texas as a slave state; Northern Congressmen were bound by a “gag rule” that banned antislavery petitions from the floor of Congress; in January, Southerners called for the censure of John Quincy Adams, who spent his post-presidential career as a Massachusetts Congressman flaunting the gag rule, and the next month, the Supreme Court ruled, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that slaveholders had a constitutional right to capture fugitive slaves in the North. Later in 1842, Philadelphia erupted in a bloody race riot, after which the black abolitionist Robert Purvis said that he saw “nothing redeeming, nothing hopeful” in recent events. “Despair black as the pall of Death hangs over us.” [3]

To Garrisonians, despairing times called for a desperate measures: disunion. But their critics, both at the time and since, have tended to view disunionism as a flight from reason into fancy. The second question I want to raise is about this interpretation of disunionism. What did Garrisonians intend, what did they mean, when they called for disunion? Answers to that question have tended to be seen through the distorting lenses ground by Garrison’s critics, who were and continue to be legion. Many abolitionists in 1842 were beginning to organize antislavery third parties and to build political coalitions among Northern voters disaffected by the power of proslavery factions in their parties. [4] These political abolitionists believed that the usurpations of the “Slave Power” could best be resisted at the polls and on the hustings. They were therefore fiercely critical of the disunionists, for whom one of the first ways to withdraw from the guilty Union was to abstain from voting. Political abolitionists said such “no-voting” advice was absurd, and many historians have murmured “amen.” Disunionism is still often seen as a priggish and self-centered agenda, which Garrisonians adopted simply for the sake of keeping their hands clean, while political abolitionists are praised for rolling up their sleeves and actually making political gains.

This critical portrait of disunionists often implies that they were essentially no different from Southern secessionists: both were good at throwing tantrums, but bad at proposing real solutions. That comparison is too much of a caricature, but it is not entirely unfair: disunionism can and should be seen as part of a long American tradition of states threatening to take their electoral votes and go home when they found out that they could not play well with other states. Yet disunionism was not merely one more chapter in an exclusively American history of secessionist thought. In the next several minutes I want to suggest that the Garrisonians had another, more immediate model for disunionism, which they found not by looking southward to Southern fire-eaters, but by looking eastward across the Atlantic, where in the 1840s Irish nationalists led by Daniel O’Connell were agitating for political independence from England. Seeing O’Connell’s movement as a model for disunionism, rather than Jefferson Davis’s, helps us answer why Garrisonians became disunionists when they did—thus shedding light on the timing question—and it also suggests a more nuanced interpretation of disunionism. Comparing disunionism to Irish Repeal, I will argue, helps us to see that Garrisonians viewed disunionism as a serious strategy for ending slavery, not just as an attempt to preserve their purity.

Improvised @ 9:47 PM