Dr. Manisha Sinha’s new book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition provides a counter to the historical narrative that is often presented of abolitionists as only being White, bourgeois reformers who were burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism.
In fact, Sinha — one of the nation’s most prominent scholars of slavery — provides a nuanced and rich understanding of abolition’s long interracial roots, starting with Black activism and the Quaker abolition societies of the Revolutionary Era up to the end of the Civil War. All along the way, Sinha unearths the story of a hidden past that includes free and enslaved people who were instrumental in the ongoing fight for freedom.
“There is this weird notion in American history that, somehow, because there were not too many slave rebellions, that enslaved Black people didn’t really resist slavery,” says Sinha, adding that slave runaways is an example of fierce resistance. “You couldn’t have a fugitive slave issue if there were not fugitive slaves. You couldn’t have an underground railroad if there were not fugitive slaves.”
Sinha, who spent 20 years as a professor in the W.E.B Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and will head to the University of Connecticut in the fall where she will hold the Draper Chair in Early American History, has written a compelling movement history of U.S abolitionism that is told in a transnational context.
Throughout the book, Sinha illustrates how the Christmas Rebellion in Jamaica in 1831, as well as Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia that very same year, influenced the politics of the time. White abolitionists learned from their Black counterparts and, in the case of Turner’s revolt, she says that William Lloyd Garrison — a White abolitionist who was committed to non-violence — publicly supported the rebellion.
“I really want people to understand abolition as this radical, interracial, social movement. It’s often not seen in that way,” says Sinha. “Abolitionists are often seen as these individual, sanctimonious, moral do-gooders with a few Blacks who had no influence on the ideology, the program and the shape of the movement.
“What I’m saying is that this is America’s civil rights movement of the 19th century and you have to understand the centrality of African-Americans in it, in shaping its program, its agenda and its ideas.”
