The fortunate heirs of freedom

Across lines of race, gender, religion, and class, abolitionists understood their reform effort in the same basic terms -- as part of a continuous struggle between the forces of power and the forces of liberty in which vigilant citizens battled tyranny and corruption, defending the independence and virtue upon which their fragile experiment in republican government depended. Focusing on that republican frame of reference, this book sheds new light on the historical imagination of the abolitionists, their views of politics and the marketplace, the relation between religion and reform, and the cultural critique embedded in abolitionism. The author convincingly argues that the reformers conceived of their work in more precise terms than historians have generally recognized; their concern lay specifically with the problem of slavery in a republic: "Abolitionists did not see themselves as antebellum reformers; theirs was a post-Revolutionary movement." - Back cover.