To the Editor:
“Stonewall and the Myth of Self-Deliverance,” by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Sunday Review, June 23), quotes from my book “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition” to challenge simple narratives of self-liberation. While the quotation from the book, identified merely as “a recent prizewinning academic history of abolition,” is correct, it misunderstands my argument.
The book does center slave resistance in the history of abolition, but it does not give short shrift to white abolitionists or to forming broader alliances with antislavery politicians and lawyers. In fact, I argue that abolition was a radical, interracial social movement that gave birth to antislavery politics.
Take, for instance, the fugitive slave issue. Without fugitive slaves voting with their feet, there would have been no fugitive slave controversy between the free and slave states or personal liberty laws and court cases that allowed abolitionists to recruit prominent antislavery allies.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln said it best when he credited “the logic and moral power of Garrison and the antislavery people of the country” for first putting emancipation on the country’s political agenda. Radical social movements like abolition not only broaden our moral imaginations but also the realm of the politically possible.
Manisha Sinha
Milan
The writer is a professor of American history at the University of Connecticut.