Neoabolitionist (or neo-abolitionist or new abolitionism) is a term used in historiography to characterize historians of race relations motivated by the spirit of racial equality typified by the abolitionists who fought to abolish slavery in the mid-19th century. They write especially about African-American history, slavery, the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era.
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As abolitionists had worked in the 19th century to end slavery and provide equal rights under the US Constitution to blacks, the new activists worked to enforce constitutional rights for all citizens and restore equality under the law for African Americans, including the practice of suffrage and civil rights.
In the late 20th century some historians emphasized the worlds of African Americans in their own words, in their own communities, to recognize them as agents, not victims. Publishing in the mid-1960s and through the 20th century, a new generation of historians began to revise traditional accounts of slavery in the United States, reconstruction, racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. Some major historians began to apply the term "neoabolitionist" to such historians, and some of this group identified as such.
Early 20th century: Dunning School
Many early 20th-century histories of the abolitionists and of the Reconstruction Era gave harsh assessments to the movement and the attempts by the federal government to force a transition in the South to a new social system. For instance, what was called the Dunning School, an influential group of white historians led by William Archibald Dunning at Columbia University, assessed Reconstruction as marred by African-American participation, saying that all the state legislatures were dominated by freedmen, that they were incompetent to govern; that they had been misled by northern carpetbaggers; and that these governments of the postwar decades were unusually corrupt.
In the 19th century after Reconstruction, former abolitionists, especially African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, presented positive views of its achievements: gaining of civil rights for African Americans, and expanded suffrage to include poor whites. In the early 20th century, Fisk University historian Alrutheus Taylor described the period of Reconstruction in North Carolina and Tennessee in several books and articles. W. E. B. Du Bois, a leading Marxist historian, published his Black Reconstruction in America in 1935, challenging the Dunning School. Du Bois stressed biracial cooperation and noted the achievements of biracial Reconstruction legislatures: establishment of public education in the South for the first time, founding of hospitals, asylums, and charitable institutions to improve general welfare. He said the higher taxes were needed to finance the new infrastructure.
New views of race and slavery
Beginning in the 1960s, historians writing about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, emphasized the human advancement achieved by the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of those who had been enslaved. Historians such as James McPherson and Martin Duberman admired the abolitionists and wrote studies of them. Through the later 20th century, such historians as David W. Blight, Michael Les Benedict, James McPherson, John Hope Franklin, and Steven Hahn marshalled documentation to reject the Dunning School notion that the Reconstruction era was overwhelmingly corrupt. They evaluated the postwar period as not more corrupt than many times of social change and turmoil in American history.
John Hope Franklin argued that Reconstruction had positive elements: most significantly, the enfranchisement of African Americans, both those already free before the war and former slaves; the extension of citizenship and civil rights to four million African Americans; and the introduction of public schools throughout the South where such schools generally had not existed. Franklin, for example, points to the founding of Howard and Fisk, historically black universities that educated generations, as two major successes of Reconstruction.
They went far beyond that in looking at slavery in detail, with changes in ideas about relations between masters and enslaved, and the various forms of resistance the latter used. The development of African-American communities, education and political culture has been intensively studied.
Historians argued that depriving African Americans of suffrage and civil rights, as was done in the South following Reconstruction, was itself a terrible form of corruption. They considered it a violation of the tenets of representative government, as African Americans had been effectively excluded from political participation and public life for decades.
In his 1988 book Eric Foner dated the beginning of Reconstruction in 1863, emphasizing the significance of emancipation and the Emancipation Proclamation. His title, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), emphasized the "unfinished" theme in its subtitle, explicitly connecting Reconstruction to the American Revolution, which had been based on ideas about human liberty and equality. His work suggested that Reconstruction had not completed the work of providing equality and rights to all American citizens, even after constitutional amendments to provide freedmen with citizenship. That work was continuing in the 20th century. His book was published after the civil rights movement gained federal legislation to enforce constitutional rights of suffrage and equal treatment under the law for African Americans and overturn state discrimination. Foner did not identify as a "neoabolitionist" in this work, nor did he refer to other historians by that term.