Volume 46, Number 16 · October 21, 1999
The Liberator
By Eric L. McKitrick
All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery
by Henry Mayer
St. Martin's, 707 pp., $32.50
There appear to be two opposing theories, implicit in how various historians have thought about the ending of slavery, for explaining the process whereby substantial numbers, perhaps a majority, of people in the Northern states were converted to an antislavery frame of mind during the thirty years or so prior to the Civil War. According to one, the conversion occurred for the most part in indirect ways, and resulted as much in a detestation of the 'Slave Power'—the planter class and its supporters—as in an abomination of the condition of slavery itself. The proslavery forces' insistence on pushing their system into the newly opened western territories, and demanding perpetual federal protection for it there and everywhere else, along with their disregard for such venerated civil liberties as freedom of speech, freedom of debate, freedom of the press, and the right of petition in their determination to stifle all discussion of slavery in Congress and at home, had all but worn away Northern patience by 1860.
Review, 4866 words
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