Colonizationists absorbed and neutralized the early antislavery movement

Evidence

But none of the moral movements were trying to stamp out the nation’s most immoral institution. The Revolutionary-era abolitionist movement was pretty much dead. Jefferson’s fatalism about the difficulty of solving the problem of evil slavery, and his habit of deflecting blame for it onto the British, had become entrenched across the nation. The convention of abolitionist societies that Benjamin Rush had gathered together in 1794 still existed, but it was no longer much of a force for change. Tiny antislavery societies in the Upper South and in the North were being swallowed up by colonizationists and their racist ideas. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 426

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports Kendi’s core inversion: the self-interested (colonization = removal, a racist policy) eroded the genuine abolitionist movement before the Civil War — connects to the reader’s need to track how policy precedes and defeats idea-driven reform.