Northern antislavery leaders split between principled abolition and free-labor politics against slavery.

Evidence

Garrison tamed his criticism of a major political party for the first time in almost thirty years, recognizing that America’s antislavery voters had flocked to the Republican fold. He envisioned its coalition of “incongruous elements” breaking up after losing the 1860 election and the genuinely antislavery politicians taking over. In the meantime, it was his job—it was the job of the movement—to “distinguish the shortcomings of the Republican platform from the promise of the Republican constituency,” that is, to persuade this constituency that there could be no compromise with slavery, and no union with slaveholders. … Lincoln turned away from the Republicans’ anti-slavery-expansion base and reached for the independents. Republicans in swing states like Illinois started focusing on the much more popular rights of “free labor,” a topic inspired by the 1857 best seller The Impending Crisis of the South by North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper. Slavery needed to end because it was retarding southern economic progress and the opportunities of non-slaveholding Whites, who were oppressed by wealthy enslavers. Helper didn’t “believe in the unity of races.” But he refused to accept the doctrine of polygenesis as a justification to continue slavery. Emancipated Africans, he wrote, should be sent to Africa. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 548

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the modern split between moral-issue purity politics and pragmatic coalition politics — echoes the reader’s interest in assessing assimilationist vs. antiracist positions; Helper’s free-labor case is a textbook example of an antiracist policy coupled to a racist ‘separatism/colonization’ solution, useful for testing the three-way scheme. — connects to: Irish nationalists used internal abolitionist disputes to distance themselves from antislavery — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 90
• DEFINE: Helper’s position is a clean example of Kendi’s point that antiracist policy can coexist with racist ideas — opposing slavery while rejecting racial equality (‘send them back to Africa’).