Basically I'm confused as to why these disunionist abolitionists were disunionists. It would seem to me that Northern secession - if it was successfully and peacefully achieved - would make it harder to end slavery in the South. Were abolitionists just trying to end their perceived personal responsibility for slavery by leaving a slave-supporting government? If disunion succeeded, did they intend to keep fighting for abolition in the South? And if they did, how did they intend to do so given that the "Slave Power" would have been truly consolidated and guarded from foreseeable domestic political threat?
Or am I misreading the disunionists and assuming that their primary disunionist goal was Northern secession instead of dissolution of the current US government/Constitution and creation of a new, antislavery one with the South included?
The upshot:
The disunion question fractured the anti-slavery movement by the 1850s, and most abolitionists asked the same question you did. Simply put, the dis-unionists asked the reverse question: how could you possibly abolish slavery without secession? The two most important avenues for influencing American thought and law were religion and politics. By the 1850s, the dis-unionists believed they had lost the theological and constitutional arguments: both the Bible and the Constitution supported slavery for most Americans. If you could not go through the standard avenues for affecting change in the system, why bother with the system?
The Argument:
If we want to destroy slavery, we must sever the US government from the influence of the slave interests. The Constitution will always favor the minority rule of slaveholders, and SCOTUS has only agreed with that so far, so the free states should split from the slave states. Many of them had really fuzzy end goals (Garrison got conservative on questions of social equality post-emancipation) but generally abolitionists were thinking like Americans do: mobilize military and economic resources to conquer surrounding territory in the West and Latin America, and then force “free soil” capitalism on a weak neighbor until you absorb it. The slave states wanted to expand territory and build more slave states; if free states secede, they can beat the south to the punch, keep the west free, and put our national money where our ideological mouth is.
The Evidence/historiography:
Constitution question: William Lloyd Garrison burned the Constitution in 1854—perhaps the symbol for white abolitionist anti-unionism. This is a great place to start. https://www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/objects/a-covenant-with-death-and-an-agreement-with-hell-2005-07-01
WLG had to grow into this position, though, and a lot of his influence came from the Irish secessionist movement happening at the same time. It’s important to remember that a lot of white radicals thought traditional laws were insufficient, but they were still pro-union. The short-lived Libertyites in New England are a good example: People like Henry Ingersol Bowditch organized protests/mobs from his home in Boston, and even formed a vigilance club, but he did not support Garrison’s disunion vision.
Manisha Sinha The Slave’s Cause (2016) – “The Irish Question” 359-365 ; “Union and Constitution,” 470-478.
Sean Wilentz’s No Property in Man has set the record straight that the Garrisonian radicals were not as original as they thought they were. Some framers saw the Constitution as an official support of slavery, others saw it as a structured means toward abolition.
Dis-union was a largely white phenomena among abolitionists. Immediatism could be unionist; Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglas unpacks the complex patriotism and constitutionalism undergirding Douglas’ radicalism. In short, most Black abolitionists wanted equality under the constitution not the destruction of the Constitution. Many white and Black activists thought the dis-unionists like WLG gave them a bad name.
Religious Question For my money, this is the real story. Whether or not the Bible supported slavery, religion guided a lot of people’s political decisions. Churches split along regional lines throughout the century, and some theologians made abolition a central issue—J.G. Birney and Theo. D. Weld brought slavery into the “New Light/Old Light” Presbyterian split in 1837. But these were small-change compared to the Baptist and Methodist North/South splits in the 1850s. Manisha Sinha called this the “precursor to political disunion” (256). [Alan Guezlo has a great synthesis of this in Fateful Lightening (2012) but I don’t have the page numbers with me]
Evangelicals and (religious) conservatives in the north and south tried to create a national community in the democratic image of Protestantism for over a century. But once the biggest churches divided on the slavery question, political union seemed less important. T.D. Bozeman’s Protestants in an Age of Science ; D.W. Howe’s The Unitarian Conscience ; and P. Harvey’s Christianity and Race in the American South all take nuanced views into the impact of anti-slavery on religious institutions. W. Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams has an excellent chapter on how white southerners justified an increasingly brutalized slavery in an increasingly religious/sentimental era.
The West Horace Greeley is the best representative for “peaceable secession,” the group of abolitionists who thought both regions would be better off without one another. His Nov. 9 186 op ed said “go in peace.” It’s not incidental that Greeley is also known for popularizing “Go West, Young man.” Northern secessionists thought the South was in a death spiral to the bottom, and they were dragging the free states down with them. Many Whig and Republican anti-slavery figures thought a genuine competition between “free soil industry” and “plantation slavery” would reveal the former is far more sustainable/powerful. Of course, the two were deeply tied together (raw materials, like financial credit, have to come from somewhere). Ex-confederates would amplify this view as part of their “lost cause” myth—i.e. a pre-modern and “noble” way of life got overrun by a powerful but inhuman tide of modern capitalism.
Lincoln’s response to Greeley also highlighted the two arguments. Lincoln was personally anti-slavery, but avowedly anti-slavery-EXPANSION. Keep slavery where it is through federal limitations and eventually the institution will give way to free labor. Alternatively, per Greeley, the federal government could shed the pro-slavery states until they are compelled to abandon slavery.
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm
E. Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men spells out the perceived power of “Free soil ideology,” giving some people hope that it could eventually win over slaveholders; Michael Morrison’s Slavery and the American West highlights the West’s importance to the CW, and how that influenced political decisions (if not abolitionist strategy). Nina Silber’s Roman of Reunion shows how imperial expansion (West and south, especially toward Cuba) helped unite the country after the war in a shared (white) vision for American nationalism.