Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Abstract

In the antebellum era, abolitionists, politicians, and Black activists in the United States fought to end slavery and demand racial justice. Along with renowned abolitionists and politicians, a diverse base of local activists and free Black people organized at the grassroots and agitated for legal rights at the state level. These proponents of civil rights formed organizations, produced publications, and created political parties to demand change in the face of fierce, often violent opposition.Earlier scholars of abolitionism and civil rights have worked to give agency to abolitionists and Black communities in this period, but a more complex problem remained. Historians have rarely interrogated the substantive mechanisms by which the fringe politics of abolitionism and racial equality worked their way into public consciousness and policy. In Until Justice Be Done, Kate Masur provides a stunning, provocative intervention to address this question: she argues that struggles to demand legal rights for African Americans in the antebellum era constituted America's first civil rights movement.While American federalism and political opposition made efforts to achieve legal equality impractical on the national stage, Masur shows that activists waged remarkable campaigns for civil rights at the state level long before the Civil War and Reconstruction. Civil rights proponents demanded rights premised on the citizenship of free Black people in northern states. They challenged state laws that restricted the legal status and rights of Black residents, producing influential campaigns that made inroads into state politics. In the mid-nineteenth century, Illinois became a significant epicenter for local movement-building that confronted the state's Black Laws. Masur shows how political organizing to demand citizenship rights for Black people in Illinois fed into the broader ascendance of the Republican Party as an antislavery coalition, both locally and nationally. Going further, Masur demonstrates how local movements for civil rights expanded to confront unequal laws across state lines. Abolitionists and their allies drew on legal protections and principles of citizenship in free states to confront the legal abuse and wrongful imprisonment of free Black sailors passing through slave states.In her final chapters, Masur uses her analysis of this antebellum civil rights movement to forge a continuity between the struggles for liberation and equal rights that took place before the Civil War and in its aftermath. She notes how activist pressure exploited new opportunities for civil rights advancement created by the war, taking the fight against black codes and support for the right to vote to places like Washington, DC, where slavery had once been firmly established, even as the war raged on. In the aftermath of the war, the Republican coalition that pushed through the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment represented a continuation of this long civil rights tradition to demand racial equality.Masur's intervention is compelling in part because it moves beyond conceptualizing social movements as an abstract force. By framing antebellum civil rights as a tradition of social movement, Masur grounds abstract ideas about changes in public consciousness in the practice of active political struggle. She homes in on evidence of activism built up from the grassroots around concrete demands for political change. The political consciousness that allowed for a national shift toward civil rights and abolition had no abstract agency of its own, but instead took root in material acts of protest, petitioning, and organizing that were often deeply unpopular and even dangerous.Through this lens of grounded social action, Until Justice Be Done brings invaluable evidence of movement-building into the historical canon. Masur demonstrates that the civil rights movement built power not through broad demands for national abolition and legal equality alone, but through conflict over substantive legal tensions regarding the rights and status of Black citizens that activists and politicians exploited strategically to demand achievable gains for civil rights wherever possible. Campaigns to demand local citizenship rights, end Black laws, and protect Black migrants represented coherent, attainable demands that proponents of civil rights used to build a new politics through action. These more local struggles have been pushed to the background by focus on abolitionism and civil rights on the national stage, but Masur shows that they were integral parts of the process of organizing and activism that allowed an American politics of civil rights to take form. By examining demands for racial equality from the Revolution to Reconstruction as a continuous tradition of social activism, Kate Masur builds a story of political change that is impressively grounded in evidence and foregrounds the agency of activists, abolitionists, and Black communities as a formative social force.