The abolitionist movement transformed America from a slaveholders’ republic into a multiracial democracy in just decades, proving that organized people are the engine of real change.
As America turns 250, social movements can look back on where we’ve been to learn how to transform this country for the future.
This July marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and it will be a time for most Americans to take stock and make meaning of where our country has been, where it is today, and where it might be going.
The mythos and story of the founding of the United States have always been contested and therefore political. One of the first histories of the United States, written in 1834 by George Bancroft, rooted the country’s origins long before 1776 to give the United States legitimacy by grounding it deeper in history. Right now, MAGA’s efforts to anchor its narrative in the story of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers are actively being used to unravel the progress of the 20th century. And even the more inclusive (though incomplete) story of the United States, anchored in Ellis Island, as a country of immigrants, is being used by some on the Left to push back against xenophobic policy. The story of the United States has always been a means to an end.
And today is no exception in the lead-up to America’s 250th.
The narratives about the 250th are themselves being fiercely contested. The Trump Administration has been wielding the force of the government to push forward a white nationalist retelling of our country’s history. This has included censoring and removing exhibits on slavery and the genocide and forced removal of Indigenous Peoples. It has also involved elevating racist provocateurs like Charlie Kirk to positions of reverence in the national record to establish a narrative legitimacy for his administration’s white nationalist agenda. Meanwhile, amongst the progressive Left, many recoil at the idea of leaning into or legitimizing the anniversary of the United States, focusing their stories instead on a critique of past and present policy.
This critical-only story, while legitimate and bolstered by historical record, is not just incomplete; it’s a strategic error if we are aiming to transform this country’s policies for the better. The major reason is that it’s hard to convince the public to trust the idea that we need to seize and transform a country we only critique. By maintaining this stance, progressives on the left may make some factual interventions to the dominant narrative, but they cede the power our predecessors tirelessly won for us. And now, on the precipice of our country’s 250th anniversary, it feels vital to articulate what a loss this is. Because we are more than an empire of evils. We are a nation that has been transformed by powerful social movements that have upended deep structures of oppression in order to make this country a place where freedom and justice could one day be for all.
It’s first important to acknowledge where we started. At its inception — despite the assertion in the Declaration that all men are created equal — America was a country built for and by wealthy white Protestant men. In the early United States, these men were constitutionally the only people with the full rights to citizenship and, therefore, autonomy. They were the only ones who could vote or serve on a jury. All others were denied the rights and full protections of citizenship — racial, religious, and gender hierarchies were etched into our founding documents to ensure power was siphoned disproportionately to the most influential — and that was intentional. The founding fathers, after all, were some of the wealthiest men in the 13 colonies. The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and writers of the Constitution were land speculators and enslavers, and their dedication to protecting their own grasp on power is manifest in our founding documents. They created trapdoors in the founding documents that enshrined minoritarian rule for the wealthy and well-connected. Beyond the obvious limitations on who could vote in elections and who could enjoy rights as a citizen, the founders also created laws like the three-fifths compromise, which inflated the political power of slaveholders and slave states by factoring the enslaved people into the electorate for apportionment, and institutions like the Senate, which gives small states disproportionate power to their population in the upper house of Congress.
Much of this infrastructure to protect the rule by a wealthy, white few has remained in place to this day and has even been reinforced, which has allowed for the oligarchic capture of our government we are experiencing at present. But though there is still work to be done, our country has made leaps and bounds away from our wealthy, white, male Protestant supremacist origins, and that, in large part, is thanks to the Abolition Movement.
Many of us, when we learn about the end of slavery in the United States, are told a story of a Great Man: President Abraham “the Emancipator” Lincoln. The Great Man Theory of politics, the theory that great leaders who made great progress — Lincoln, who emancipated the enslaved, FDR, who brought about the New Deal, LBJ, who created the Great Society — were gifted leaders rising to solve a great crisis, is a common historicization of how transformative change has happened in American history. It’s also a lie. Because behind every transformative change in this country, there was a grassroots mass movement building power.
In the case of the end of slavery, that movement was the abolitionist movement: a sprawling, massive, national grassroots movement that engaged millions of people in the United States. The abolitionist movement used all sorts of tactics from petitions to self-emancipation, to newspapers, with the goal of making the abolishment of slavery an urgent priority in the public political sphere. But that urgency was hard-won. In the early 19th century, the idea that slavery would be abolished anytime in the future was far-fetched. Slavery was so intertwined with the economy of the United States that even those who supported ending slavery thought that, at best, it would happen over the course of decades through gradual, incremental manumission.
That all changed in 1833 in the wake of the creation of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), a mass-based organization started by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan whose membership included many prominent Black abolitionists like Fredrick Douglass and William Wells Brown. The AASS dedicated itself to exposing the horrors of slavery to make the abolition of slavery an urgent moral crisis that needed to be dealt with immediately. The AASS organized speakouts of the formerly enslaved, circulated newspapers with first-person testimonies about the horrors of slavery, and funneled money and support into the Underground Railroad. At a time when the total United States population hovered around 19 million people, the American Anti-Slavery Society had a quarter of a million people counted amongst its base, tirelessly working to bring slavery to an end through exposing the evils of slavery to the American public.
As far as strategy was concerned, however, there were multiple schools of thought in the Abolitionist movement. One faction, including William Lloyd Garrison, did not just advocate for the abolition of slavery, but the abolition of the United States in its entirety. Because the institutions of the United States were irrevocably interlinked with the mechanisms of slavery, the Union itself had to be dissolved, a position Garrison advocated with a strategy of moral persuasion, advocacy, and pacifism, eschewing any compromise or political engagement with a government guilty of furthering slavery and imperialism.
The other faction took a different route. They concluded that the only entity that could immediately end slavery in the United States was the government of the United States and thus made a decision not just to rely on moral suasion, but to build political power and socialize the case that slavery was unconstitutional under US law. In 1841, leaders of this faction created the Liberty Party, an abolitionist political party to push the need to immediately end slavery in the political arena. Counter to those in Garrison’s wing of the abolitionist movement, they argued that the Constitution was in fact an anti-slavery document, a narrative that was backed by the publication of Lysander Spooner’s The Unconstitutionality of Slavery in 1845, which diligently lays out the illegality of slavery within the context of America’s founding documents.
The idea gained traction rapidly. By 1858, the idea that slavery conflicts with the Constitution had become commonplace in the American public and in American politics, and slavery had become the central conflict of the country. So much so that Abraham Lincoln, when running for Senator in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, stopped short of advocating for abolition but argued, “There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.”
After traveling from the Liberty Party to the Free Soil Party, the abolitionist ideas made their way into the platform of the newly minted Republican Party. When Lincoln became the President in 1861, his inauguration signaled a triumph of the unconstitutionality of slavery and the secession of the Confederacy in order to found a new country. To quote Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens, this new country would be “founded on the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
As the war broke out, it was the power base of the radical republicans, the American Anti-Slavery Society, and Freedmen’s Bureaus that pushed Lincoln to use the war to justify the immediate emancipation of enslaved people. And when the war concluded, it was this power base that was in a position to rewrite the rules of the country.
The Abolitionist movement understood that the government was not intrinsically bad but was being wielded by a proslavery faction to impose slavery nationwide. And they also understood that that faction could be removed. That orientation towards power allowed them to engage with government as a tool that could be used both for ill and for good, and in the wake of the Civil War, they used the power and institutions of the government to impose a new anti-white supremacist order on the country, commonly known as Reconstruction.
There are more lessons than I can name that we can pull from the Abolitionist movement, but for the duration of this article, I will focus on three key lessons the progressive movement can take forward to set the agenda for the next 250 years of our country: following in the footsteps of our predecessors, embracing power, and understanding the inextricable connection between economic justice, racial justice, and democracy.
1. We have a Blueprint for Transformative Change
Transformative changes, for good and for ill, happen in a relatively short time when a few key elements align to build people power and narrative power, and to win political power through the seizure of a political party. In the Abolitionist movement, these three key components aligned to, in just a few decades, transform a government that was actively entrenching and bolstering white supremacy into one regrounded in equality with a foundation for a real multi-racial democracy.
- First, we see a foundation of mass-based organization in the American Anti-Slavery Society. The American Anti-Slavery Society could boast an organizational membership that was over 1% of the population at the time. That level of scale and organization in people working together transformed public sentiment about ending slavery from an eventuality into the most pressing issue of the era.
- We see a fight for the narrative. Specifically in the abolitionist movement, we see a turn in strategy to seize the narrative and to frame the country in opposition to slavery. Moving from a pure (and rightful) critique of the country and its complicity with slavery to an orientation of criticizing the faction that was wielding the country to continue slavery against its own founding ideals created space for mainstream support for the abolition of slavery.
- A clarity around seizing government and power. The Abolitionist movement didn’t just elect their own champions; they organized their grassroots base, politically mobilizing other Republicans to their side, pushing even mainstream candidates like Lincoln to take radical stances.
At the end of the war, this political power was in place and had enough public support to re-found the country, passing amendments and using the force of government to, for a time, dismantle systems of inequality and white supremacy. To sum up, mass-Based organizations creating narrative urgency and wielding political power through a party have served as the blueprint for change in America. From the Abolitionist Movement, to the Civil Rights movement, to the current MAGA Movement, these three components in combination work.
- It’s time to get serious about governing power
Despite initial factions of the Abolitionist movement rejecting politics and government engagement, by the end of the war the movement largely coalesced around gaining and wielding government power. Even Fredrick Douglass, who initially viewed the Constitution as a pro-slavery document, split from Garrison and went on to use the Declaration as a foundation for equality for all people. In the aftermath of the Civil War, abolitionist organizations were able to entrench many of their aims into law because they had a large organized base, public will, and political champions in seats of power to move their agenda. As a result, they were able to fundamentally remake the country, laying a foundation for true equality under the law. The movement understood the government could be wielded for good and used the power they built to pass the Reconstruction Amendments and to enforce them throughout the nation. The moment the movement base fell apart, however, that power began to waver. The American Anti-Slavery Society dissolved itself in 1870 after the passage of the 15th Amendment, disrupting the organization of the power base needed to enforce Reconstruction. From then on, support in continuing the racial justice agenda of Reconstruction dwindled within the government until Reconstruction was abandoned in 1877. In this example, we can see how government can be a tool used to advance our agenda, but electing champions isn’t enough. We must also have organized mass-based organizations to push our government to enact our agenda.
3. The path to multi-racial democracy leads through racial justice
At a time when the progressive movement seems to be in retreat, around the role white supremacy is playing in our politics, and message testing firms are encouraging class-reductionist talking points to “unify” people around affordability, it feels important to reground in the reality that deep democratic reform in this country has happened largely on the heels of racial justice movements. Both Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement (sometimes referred to as the Second Reconstruction) were race-conscious movements for equality that resulted in dealing blows to white supremacy, exploitation, and authoritarianism. The path to multi-racial democracy and economic justice simply cannot be disentangled from the fight against white supremacy, given the particular history of this country employing a government-created race-based caste system to justify enslavement and exploitation, and Indigenous land theft.
At Get Free, the movement organization I lead and helped co-found, this is a truth we make our mission to lift up — that the path to true equality and multiracial democracy must go through reckoning with our nation’s ongoing legacy of white supremacy, not around it. Indeed, this interconnection could not be playing out more clearly than it is in the current era, with the recent MAGA-led unraveling of the Voting Rights and the stripping of representation from Black and Brown Americans across the country. Our frail, multi-racial democracy has already teetered back into the reality of white-supremacist Jim Crow, and this regime is just getting started.
As we prepare to turn 250 years old, this country is in a dire situation. We have officially slipped into authoritarianism, wealth inequality is more rampant than ever, and a nakedly white-supremacist government slashes hard-won rights to equal protection while carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign. Get Free, and our partners are seizing this opportunity to mobilize people towards a counter-narrative of what our country is and what it can be. We are extending an invitation to all Americans this June 27th to reject the MAGA vision for our future and instead step into celebrating how far our country has come towards making equality real and committing to reckoning with our full history and ongoing legacies of slavery, native genocide and dispossession, and White Supremacy to finish the job of making this country a place for all of us.
In seizing the opportunity to use America’s ideals to force it to reckon with and rectify its ongoing legacies of inequality, we can take solace in knowing we are not breaking new ground — we’ve been here before. The work of those who came before can show us the roadmap to make a country where equality is real for all. All we need to do is follow the path they have laid out for us.
