In Search of Abolitionist Modernity

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Abstract

During the early 1880s, veteran abolitionist agitator Oliver Johnson and veteran Republican operative George W. Julian publicly debated the origins of modern abolitionism. The precise founder of the immediate emancipation campaign preoccupied each activist-turned-historian in a rhetorical boxing match that initially played out on the pages of a monthly magazine. Julian delivered a revisionist first blow, by contending that Charles Osborn, a relatively obscure Quaker whose reformism had taken place in Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana, effectively discovered the doctrine of immediatism in 1814, well before William Lloyd Garrison or anyone else in the United States promulgated it starting in the 1830s. In a counterpunch, Johnson dismissed Osborn's purportedly pioneering antislavery standing. For that devout Garrisonian, a new and revolutionary phase of antislavery agitation materialized in 1831 solely, when his lifelong friend and humanitarian collaborator had launched the Bostonbased newspaper,  The Liberator .
Original languageAmerican English
JournalReviews in American History
Volume49
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2021

EGS Disciplines

  • United States History

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