The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union by Frank J. Cirillo (review)

Over the last sixty years, James M. McPherson's two volumes examining late-nineteenth-century abolitionism—The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964) and The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, 1975)—have inhabited a sparsely populated historiographical landscape. With the possible exception of historical biographies and studies of collective memory, few published monographs have significantly explored the same terrain. Two recent works, issued in back-to-back months, resume McPherson's pioneering scholarship: this reviewer's Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865–1909 (New York, 2023) and the book currently under review.