In recent years, activists have agitated to end mass incarceration, housing insecurity and police brutality but have been stymied by politicians unwilling to act decisively. As we navigate a moment in which transformative change is needed yet only piecemeal change is proposed, it may be helpful to recall the story of Abraham Lincoln and an abolitionist who wanted him dead.
For Lydia Maria Child, the end of slavery was urgent — not something that could be slowly implemented. Her story shows that tensions between activists insisting on radical change and politicians who favor gradual reform are nothing new. And the trade-offs involved in compromise may come at a steep cost.
By the time the Civil War began, Lydia Maria Child had been fighting slavery for 30 years. A White woman born in 1802 in Medford, Mass., she gained early fame as a beloved novelist and children’s author but soon sacrificed her career to dedicate her life to abolition. In 1833, she published “An Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans,” the first book-length argument against slavery in the United States. The book was so radical in its call for racial justice and so scathing in its indictment of Northern racism that outraged readers abandoned her in droves.
The decades that followed were harrowing. As abolitionists began to threaten American political and economic unity by condemning its foundation in slavery, Northern anti-abolitionist sentiment soared. From Maine to Philadelphia, mobs attacked abolitionist speakers, Black and White, destroying their printing presses and burning their lecture halls to the ground.
Child more than once placed her body between male abolitionist speakers and their would-be assailants, daring the rioters to attack a woman first. She lost friendships forged in shared activism as the anti-slavery movement splintered over whether female abolitionists should be allowed to speak in public. She and her husband moved to central Massachusetts to farm sugar beets, hoping to undermine the Southern cane sugar produced by slave labor. They went bankrupt instead.
By the time Lincoln was elected in 1860, she had tried both radical and gradual tactics. She had endured decades of physical threats, poverty and ostracism. None of this mattered to her. What mattered was that millions of humans remained enslaved in the South in unspeakably cruel conditions that, she wrote, should put every American to shame.
Lincoln’s election should have given her hope. But emancipation was not Lincoln’s priority. He had made that very clear. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that,” he wrote. Bargaining enslavement for peace was crucial to Lincoln’s careful political calculations. To a lifetime abolitionist like Child, it was simply unforgivable.
Then things got worse. Between December 1860 and June 1861, 11 Southern states seceded from the Union to protect slavery. As tensions between North and South escalated, four enslaved men escaped their enslavers, fleeing over 30 miles of swamp to reach Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Fla. There they turned themselves in to the U.S. Army, hoping for refuge. But Lincoln was desperate to convince Southern states that he would protect their human property and preserve slavery if they would return to the fold. American soldiers, funded by taxpayers’ dollars, were deployed to return the men to their enslavers.
The incident made national news. Child convulsed in rage and sorrow. “I have raved and I have wept about that Fort Pickens affair,” she wrote to Sarah Shaw, her beloved friend, whose son, Robert Gould Shaw, would die in 1863 at the head of a troop of Black Union soldiers. “[E]very flap of the stars and stripes repeats to me the story of those poor slaves who, through great perils and sufferings, succeeded in making their way to Fort Pickens, strengthened by the faith that President Lincoln was their friend, and that his soldiers would protect them. They were chained and sent back to their masters, who whipped them till they nearly died under the lash,” she grieved. “When such things are done under the U.S. flag, I cannot and will not say ‘God bless it!’” she pledged. “Nay, unless it ceases from this iniquity, I say deliberately and solemnly, ‘May the curse of God rest upon it! May it be trampled in the dust, kicked by rebels, and spit upon by tyrants!’”
As the war raged, Lincoln continued to assure Southern states that slavery could continue if they would return. When Union Gen. John Frémont declared that all men enslaved by rebels in Missouri were now free, Lincoln overruled him. When Gen. David Hunter enlisted formerly enslaved men into his division, Lincoln ordered them out. When Gen. John Phelps organized the fugitive slaves harboring in his camp into military units, he was told to have them chop trees instead.
Child’s fury at her president reached new heights. “I never see Old Abe’s pictur [sic] without thinking that his lanky neck looks as if he was made to be hanged,” she fumed. She would be “gratified by having a bomb-shell burst in the White House,” she declared. Short of that, she wished for Lincoln’s capture. “I should like,” she wrote again to Shaw, “to have Jeff Davis take Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, and Seward, and Smith all prisoners,” she wrote of the president, his wife and members of his cabinet.
These thoughts she expressed only privately to friends. In public, she was less murderous but no less passionate. In 1862, she penned a widely published open letter to the president, protesting his refusal to let his generals do the right thing. “If you can thus stifle the moral enthusiasm of noble souls; if you can thus disappoint the hopes of poor, helpless wretches, who trust in you as the appointed agent of their deliverance, may God forgive you!” Child concluded. “It will,” she predicted, “require infinite mercy to do it.”
But when Lincoln’s slow calculations culminated in the moral ecstasy of emancipation, Child relented. In 1864, she was willing to admit to some admiration. “Abraham Lincoln is a ‘slow coach,’ and I have often been out of patience with him,” she acknowledged. She wished that he had achieved emancipation through moral conviction rather than political calculation. “But I believe he is a thoroughly honest man,” she conceded: “the very best man that the moral condition of the American people admitted of being elected.” Elsewhere, she put it more simply: “He is a better president than we deserve.”
When John Wilkes Booth’s own murderous rage left Lincoln dead, Child was philosophical. She kept her attention on the goal that had defined her life: racial justice. “Dreadful as this is, perhaps it is only another of the wonderful manifestations of Providence,” she speculated. “The kindhearted Abraham, was certainly in danger of making too easy terms with the rebels,” she mused. “Perhaps he has been removed, that he might not defeat his own work, and that another, better calculated to carry it to a safe and sure end, might come into his place.”
Alas, that person was Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson. Soon Johnson would brutally dash abolitionists’ hopes that a more just society would emerge from the carnage of the Civil War. Black Americans’ stunning gains during Reconstruction in education and politics were swiftly erased by “Black Codes,” economic exploitation and by the racial terror of the Ku Klux Klan. The dream of true democracy and collective liberation was again deferred. In the end, even for Child, Lincoln’s death had come too soon.
Not until the successes of the civil rights movement in the 1960s would the United States come anywhere close to fulfilling ideals of racial equality that abolitionists, Black and White, envisioned. The struggle for Black freedom continues today, with urgent debates about what kinds of change can be imagined and undertaken. Child reminds us that our job is to hold politicians “at the point of a moral bayonet,” as she put it, lest that change be bargained away, as well.