“TO THINK JUST LIKE YOU DO”: HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET, MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN AND THE MEANING OF BLACK FREEDOM

In the three decades before the Civil War, the abolitionists Henry Highland Garnet and Maria Weston Chapman played influential roles in disparate factions of the American anti-slavery movement both as anti-slavery intellectuals, articulating distinct visions of what it meant to oppose slavery, and as organizers, working to mobilize different groups of Americans to act on their visions. Tracing these two anti-slavery activists’ careers highlights the role of gender and racial ideologies in the ways that Garnet and Chapman sought to access the public sphere. Their two career arcs also underscore the dialectical nature of anti-slavery thought. Their writings and activism exemplify contrasting understandings of Black liberation within the American anti-slavery movement. While Garnet, like many of his colleagues in the Colored Convention Movement, consistently pointed towards a vision of Black freedom as one characterized by Black people's political and economic self-determination, Chapman described her mission as the removal of the "sin" and "violence" of slavery from American society. Examining these differences emphasizes that American abolitionists disagreed not only over the proper tactics and strategies to end slavery, but the characters of the societies they were trying to create.