The Abolitionist Civil War

Frank J. Cirillo is a historian of slavery and antislavery in the nineteenth-century United States. He has held positions at the University of Bonn, The New School, and the University of Virginia.

In compelling and captivating prose, The Abolitionist Civil War lays bare the internecine conflict that raged within abolitionism between 1861 and 1865. With a lively cast of characters, it reminds us that emancipation was not inevitable, nor had the Republican Party rendered abolitionists irrelevant. Perhaps most importantly, this war within a war helps explain why the American Civil War achieved so much and so little in the name of racial justice." - Caroline E. Janney, author of Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox "American abolitionists faced a perplexing dilemma: Could a war being waged to restore the Union be transformed into a war to abolish slavery? And even if so, how might the national scourge of anti-Black prejudice be overcome? William Lloyd Garrison accepted Abraham Lincoln's flawed compromise-emancipation without equality. But Frank J. Cirillo applauds Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, and Abby Kelley Foster, who kept striving to create 'a multiracial democracy.' This fine book untangles key aspects of the wartime struggle for freedom and equal rights. It shows what the abolitionists were up against-and how a prophetic vanguard refused to trim their sails." - Daniel W. Crofts, author of Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union