The American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade

In his autobiography, Cheerful Yesterdays, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, looking back on the long crusade that ended with the abolition of Negro bondage in the United States, declared: “The anti-slavery movement was not strongest in the educated classes, but was primarily a people's movement, based on the simplest human instincts and far stronger … in the factories and shoe-shops than in the pulpits and colleges.†Few people have challenged this statement, which Higginson made in 1898; probably because the scarcity of material on the subject has prevented a thorough examination of all its implications, and especially of the main argument that the laboring man was the real force behind the antislavery crusade.Yet there is sufficient evidence to throw serious doubt upon the accuracy of Higginson's statement, evidence which reveals that workers in shops and factories often exhibited an almost callous unconcern for the entire crusade.