Why Abolitionists Sought Disunion

The idea that the Civil War was a fight between a centralized Union that ended slavery and a decentralized South that defended it misses a key fact. Many of the most vocal abolitionists before the war argued for secession. They believed the Union itself protected slavery.

Lysander Spooner called the war a conflict "carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth." The federal government had spent decades enforcing the institution. The Constitution accommodated slavery. Congress protected it. Federal courts upheld it. Federal officers returned fugitive slaves.

Only after slaveholding states tried to leave, citing slavery as a cause, did the federal government shift from protector to destroyer. The nation-state abandoned a long legal defense of chattel slavery to keep the Union together by force.

William Rawle, founder and president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, made the case for secession in his widely read "View of the Constitution." George Washington appointed him attorney general of Pennsylvania. Rawle wrote that "the secession of a state from the Union depends on the will of the people of such state." The states, he added, "may wholly withdraw from the Union."

William Leggett, a laissez-faire Jacksonian Democrat and outspoken opponent of slavery, argued the Union was not worth preserving at the expense of liberty. He wrote: "If the tie of confederation is of such a kind that the breath of free discussion will inevitably dissolve it; if we can hope to maintain our fraternal connexion with our brothers of the south only by dismissing all hope of ultimate freedom to the slave; let the compact be dissolved."

William Lloyd Garrison made disunion a central part of the abolitionist program. The Garrisonian wing adopted "No Union with Slaveholders" as a rallying cry. Garrison called for "the dissolution of this slavery-cursed Union." He believed that breaking the Union would "give the finishing blow to the slave system."

Horace Greeley, another Northern abolitionist, wrote in the New York Tribune in February 1861 that the Southern states had a clear moral right to form an independent nation. He said: "If the Slave States, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so."

Wendell Phillips explained the abolitionist strategy in a pamphlet titled "No Union with Slaveholders." He wrote: "Disunion is a course, by which a man or a state may immediately disconnect themselves from the sin of sustaining slavery." He argued that the history of the Union showed "the fatal effects of every compromise with evil." The experience of fifty years, he said, proved that "it is impossible for free and slave States to unite on any terms, without all becoming partners in the guilt and responsible for the sin of slavery."

These anti-slavery disunionists saw secession as a solution, not a problem. Their strategy was to weaken slavery by removing its key legal protections. That history is often lost in a narrative that celebrates the powerful nation-state as the basis of freedom. The nation-state tolerated slavery as long as it did not threaten national power. When it did, the state was willing to eliminate chattel slavery to maintain its own authority.