All 20 Uses
abolition
in
What They Fought For - 1861-1865
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- The antebellum propaganda war between North and South had created in southern minds an image of the hated Yankees as an amalgam of money-grubbing mudsill Black Republican abolitionist Goths and Vandals.†
p. 19.5abolitionist = a reformer who favored ending slavery
- "I will never stand by and see my native soil polluted by a horde of Abolition incendiaries" or for that matter by the "lowest and most contemptible race upon the face of God's earth,"†
p. 19.8 *
- The son of a wealthy Georgia planter still believed that "the negro's happiest condition is in slavery," but between abolition by the Yankees and emancipation by Confederates he was willing to choose "the lesser of two evils."†
p. 55.5
- And while the abolition of slavery was one of the two great results of the Civil War—the other being preservation of one nation indivisible—not many Union soldiers claimed to fight primarily for that purpose.†
p. 56.3
- But if "emancipation per se" meant a perception that the abolition of slavery was inseparably linked to the goal of preserving the Union, then almost three in ten Union soldiers took this position during the first year and a half of the war, and many more were eventually converted to it.†
p. 56.8
- A farmer's son from Connecticut dropped out of Yale after his sophomore year in 1861 and enlisted in a cavalry regiment, as he explained to his mother, to fight "for Liberty, for the slave and the white man alike....I have turned out to be a right out and out Abolitionist.†
p. 58.2abolitionist = a reformer who favored ending slavery
- Attempts by their masters to reclaim these fugitives turned soldiers previously indifferent toward slavery into practical abolitionists.†
p. 59.1abolitionists = reformers who favored ending slavery
- An abolitionist clergyman's son in the 12th Maine wrote home from Louisiana in the summer of 1862 that "I do not want to hear any more about negroes when I get home....I have got sick and tired of them ...and I shall hereafter let abolition alone....They are a set of thieves ...and the boys here hate them worse than they do secesh."†
p. 61.1abolitionist = a reformer who favored ending slavery
- An abolitionist clergyman's son in the 12th Maine wrote home from Louisiana in the summer of 1862 that "I do not want to hear any more about negroes when I get home....I have got sick and tired of them ...and I shall hereafter let abolition alone....They are a set of thieves ...and the boys here hate them worse than they do secesh."†
p. 61.2
- An artillery major from New York, a Democrat like so many officers in the Army of the Potomac under McClellan, wrote that if Lincoln caved in to "these 'black Republicans' and made it "an abolition war[,] ...I for one shall be sorry that I ever lent a hand to it....This war [must be] for the preservation of the Union, the putting down of armed rebellion, and for that purpose only."†
p. 61.3
- "I am no abolitionist," wrote an enlisted man in the 55th Ohio, "in fact despise the word," but "as long as slavery exists ...there will be no permanent peace for America....Hence I am in favor of killing slavery."†
p. 62.6abolitionist = a reformer who favored ending slavery
- By June, 1863, he had become converted to the idea that abolition of slavery was "a means of haistening the speedy Restoration of the union and the termination of the war."†
p. 65.7
- But young Welton became a Republican, and by early 1865 he sounded just like an abolitionist when he wrote in joyful anticipation of a restored nation "free free free yes free from that blighting curs Slavery the cause of four years of Bloody Warfare."†
p. 65.9abolitionist = a reformer who favored ending slavery
- By April, 1863, he had repudiated the Democratic party; by January, 1864, a few months before he was killed in the Red River campaign, he wrote his wife from Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, that "since I [came] here I have learned and seen more of what the horrors of Slavery was than I ever knew before....I am [in] favor of doing away with the ...accursed institution....I am [now] a strong abolitionist."†
p. 66.4
- A junior officer in the 86th Indiana reported in March, 1863, that men who two months earlier had damned the "abolition war" and threatened to desert now favored both emancipation and black soldiers.†
p. 66.7
- So long as [my] flag is confronted by the hostile guns of slavery ...I am as confirmed an abolitionist as ever was pelted with stale eggs.†
p. 67.1abolitionist = a reformer who favored ending slavery
- '" Not all antiabolitionist soldiers experienced such a conversion.†
p. 67.1antiabolitionist = against "abolitionist"
- A private in the 6th Kentucky complained in the spring of 1864 that "this is nothing but an abolition war....I am a strait out Union and Constitution man I am not for freeing the negroes."†
p. 67.3
- Had the Michigan sergeant lived to witness the North's retreat from Reconstruction in the 1870s and the South's disfranchisement and formalized segregation of blacks in the 1890s, he might have wondered whether the abolition of slavery had revolutionized everything after all.†
p. 68.2
- Many of them reached a tacit consensus, which some voiced openly: Confederate soldiers had not fought for slavery; Union soldiers had not fought for its abolition.†
p. 68.5
Definitions:
-
(1)
(abolition) the act of formally ending a system, practice, or institution -- most often used to refer to the movement to end slavery when no specific system is named
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)