At stake, she insists, is nothing less than the “potential of democratic radicalism” itself. In The Slave’s Cause, she offers nearly 750 impassioned pages for considering abolitionism as a longstanding progressive force in American life. For some time, the answer has not been the abolitionists. “Who freed the slaves?” the question goes. Indeed, Sinha calls them “the forgotten emancipationists.” But by far the most daunting challenge she faces is the fact that emancipation came only during the Civil War and the view, now widely held, that it wasn’t primarily the accomplishment of Abraham Lincoln or the Republican Party, but of the slaves themselves, precipitated by the actions they took inside the Confederacy and in their flight to Union lines. Fights about John Brown notwithstanding (was he a terrorist or merely insane?), little scholarship in the recent past has placed much emphasis on the abolitionists as a historical force.
To make the case for the centrality of abolitionists to the emancipation of the slaves, she has to redeem the movement itself from insignificance and its participants from charges of racist paternalism and bourgeois self-interest. What, then, of the abolitionists? Did they not weigh decisively in the national contest on the side of the slave? Manisha Sinha argues on their behalf in The Slave’s Cause. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition
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