Eric Foner responds to “The Mass Politics of Antislavery,” historian Matt Karp’s article in the latest issue of “Catalyst”:
https://catalyst-journal.com/vol3/no2...

Moderated by Catalyst editor Vivek Chibber. “Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy” is published quarterly by the Jacobin Foundation.

Filmed at Verso Books in Brooklyn on December 3, 2019.

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In a bracing new analysis of the Civil War era, Karp revisits the dynamics leading up to the abolition of slavery. Karp argues that while the nineteenth century witnessed the demise of slavery across the Americas and the Caribbean, the United States was alone in that its road to abolition led through a massive electoral movement.

Whereas in other countries, abolition came through war and revolution, or was elite-led, the American story was one in which an electoral victory preceded any military or elite action. Lincoln’s Republican Party came to power on a platform dedicated to slavery abolition. Furthermore, it built a massive social base for its policy even in the North, by linking it to the class interests of Northern workers and farmers. Karp’s article joins a growing wave of scholarship forcing us to rethink the origins of emancipation in the United States, but adds to it a critical dimension of class politics not sufficiently appreciated.

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Eric Foner is the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and author of many books on the Civil War including “Reconstruction” and “The Fiery Trial.”

Matt Karp is an associate professor of history at Princeton University, and the author of “This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of Foreign Policy.” Karp is also a contributing editor at Jacobin.