In the United States, the property question could never be divorced from the slavery question. In Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution, Lynd explained how and why the Revolutionaries crafted a “compromise of 1787”: northern capitalists and the plantocracy securing each others’ interests, in the process keeping the antislavery and levelling radicals at bay. Just as persuasively, Lynd showed how Jefferson and his political heirs conceived of American history as driven by embattled farmers against conspiring urban elites. The roots of such orthodox progressive history lie in the so-called great compromises of the early republic (Though abolitionists tried to undo that orthodoxy by forcing the nation to confront what they called its original sin). Just as importantly, Lynd excavated the roots of contemporary American historical imagination in the abolitionists’ own debate about whether the constitution was proslavery (William Lloyd Garrison) or in the last instance antislavery (Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln).
Intellectual Origins tells the sunnier side of the story: an important strain of radical and cosmopolitan thinking survived the compromises that secured northern (mercantile) private property by solidifying southern (slave) property. Given that certain figures in the founders’ generation “demythologized” private property, the Revolutionary mind-set could still be a resource for those who argued against slavery, despite the Constitution’s turn toward the safeguarding of property as a greater good. And, indeed, the struggle against racial slavery could be about more than that: more even than a defense of a free labor system construed as the opposite of chattel slavery. It might become, like the ideology of the Revolution itself, a site of internationalism in a nationalist age and of a critique of capitalism insofar as contemporary capitalism relied on slave labor.
While the mainstreaming of antislavery in the north may have had much to do with its compatibility with wage labor, there were other aspects of abolitionism, especially in its more uncompromising versions, that existed in tension with the status quo antebellum and pointed toward democratic expansions of the political landscape. It was the radical democratic imperatives of abolitionism, including advocacy of the right to free speech, perhaps as much as the insistence on free labor in the territories, that upset the political consensus over slavery. On this score, recent appreciations of the abolitionists can be read as an extended footnote to Lynd. What’s news here is the recognition now given to the role played by African American activists and thinkers. The irreverent populists, influential Quakers, working-class William Lloyd Garrison, and anti-capitalist Henry David Thoreau we meet in Intellectual Origins, all of whom thought long and hard before acting to change history, are now familiar figures who live in your local Barnes and Noble.