Abolitionists

Abolitionists

Thomas Allen

For the most part, abolitionists did not care about Blacks or slavery. Many New Englanders grew rich off the slave trade. They wanted to free the slaves, not because they hated slavery; they hated Southerners and wanted to use free Blacks to destroy Southerners and their way of life. That was a primary objective of Reconstruction, and that objective was mostly achieved. What the First Reconstruction failed to accomplish, the Second Reconstruction has sought to achieve. 

Their hatred of Southerners led many abolitionists to advocate the genocide of Southerners. Theodore Dwight Weld declared that “every slaveholder has forfeited his right to live.” (Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War [New York, 1961], pp. 21-22). Southerners must be annihilated at all costs, even at the cost of the beloved Negro. Abolitionist James Redpath stated his willingness to sacrifice the Negro when he wrote the following, “if all slaves in the United States — men, women and helpless babes — were to fall on the field or become the victims of vengeance . . . if only one man survived to enjoy the freedom they had won, the liberty of that solitary negro . . . would be cheaply purchased by the universal slaughter of his people and their oppressors.” (Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War [New York, 1961], pp. 20-21). Despite all their platitudes about the virtues of the Negro, the abolitionists valued him so lowly that they were willing to sacrifice all living, breathing Negroes for the sake of one free Negro in the abstract. So much for their sophism.

The abolitionists saw equality as a means to punish Southerners. C. Vann Woodward described this hatred for Southerners:

Abolitionists had grounded their whole crusade against slavery on the proposition that it was a “sin.” It is not sufficient simply to abolish a sin; it has to be expiated, and the sinner purified. Purification and expiation involve penance and suffering. Equality had a punitive purpose: the infliction of a penance of humiliation upon the status of the sinner. For those with an uncomplicated interest in sheer vengeance upon a hated foe, equality had punitive uses of a simpler sort. (C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History [New York, 1960], p. 76.)

Abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, who was arguably the most powerful man in the United States government from the death of Lincoln in 1865 until his own death in 1868, said that the United States should treat the Southern States “as conquered provinces and settle them with new men and exterminate or drive out the present rebels as exiles.” (Walter L. Fleming, The Sequel of Appomattox: A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States [New Haven, 1919], p. 59.)

According to Thomas Page, “the eight years of negro domination in the South cost the South more than the entire cost of the war, inclusive of the loss of values in slave property.” (Thomas Nelson Page, The Old South; Essays Social and Political [New York, 1911], p. 333.) In the end, what Reconstruction gave the South was, as Walter Fleming described, a “new generation of whites [that] was poor, bitter because of persecution, ill educated, overworked, without a bright future, and shadowed by the race problem.” (Walter L. Fleming, The Sequel of Appomattox: A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States [New Haven, 1919], p. 289.)  (For more quotations about Reconstruction destroying the South, see “The First Reconstruction” by Thomas Allen.)

Copyright © 2026 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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