 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. We're here today to talk about slavery and abolition. Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery. End of story. No, no, no. Abolition, slave emancipation, is not only a signal event in American history, but it is a signal event in world history and something that bears detailed study. Slave emancipation is the only case we have in historical times of the transformation of a social system. The end of one way of organizing society and the establishment of a new system. There were other transitions, sort of sometime between the fourth and sixth centuries. There was a transition from classical slavery to feudalism. Sometime between 1200 and 1789, there was a transition from feudalism to capitalism. These are amorphous periods. There's not a whole lot of documentation. It's hard to understand them. Slavery emancipation is completely different. Abolition happened in the time of the printing press. It happened almost in people's living memory. And it was a huge transformation. You cannot overstate how important slavery was. The Americans were settled by the Europeans as a place to put their slaves and to work their slaves. Slavery was the raison d'etre of European settlement. And it was a source of the greatest wealth the world had ever seen. By working slaves hard and transferring their product to their own selves, slave owners became the wealthiest people the world had ever seen. All the great fortunes in Britain, all of the significant fortunes in the United States, were rooted in slavery. And even those significant fortunes in the United States, mind you, rich people in Massachusetts were poor compared to rich people in South Carolina or Georgia. But even those, most of the major fortunes in the Northern United States, such as they were, were rooted in industries like cotton textiles or New York City mercantile activities that depended on the South. So overturning the slave system, something that happened between 1820 and 1865, that was huge. How did they do it? How did the abolitionists do this? This is important to understand American history. It's also important for those of you who are interested in overturning capitalism or transforming our system of ecological destruction to a system that's more sustainable. Making a major change is difficult. How did they do it? They made a huge change. There basically were two camps of abolitionists. There were the moral campaignists, starting with William Lloyd Garrison and continuing with people coming out of the evangelical Christian communities of the Second Great Awakening, which swept across the North in the early 19th century. Garrison was, you cannot but admire the man. Mind you, he was bullheaded and obnoxious and arrogant and all those things. But he had passion for equality. He, as much as any abolitionists, carried through the whole idea all the way. All men are created equal. That includes the African. That means that we need full civil rights for the African, not just emancipation. And he would not shut up, as he wrote in the beginning of the first issue of the Liberator, his newspaper, 1831, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. I am an earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard. Is that great language? And given the context, it's a Shakespearean. Now, conservatives from Ulrich B. Phillips and all have attacked the abolitionists once you set yourself up as morally superior, making a moral campaign against slavery. And then, of course, people are going to attack you. And you say, you're not so great. But the moral campaign was central to abolition. But it was only one leg of the campaign. Consider. Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution of the United States. He attacked it as a compact with the devil. Forged in hell. This is not a man who is involved in political compromise. The same values that led Garrison and some people around him to stand up against mobs, at one point, Garrison had a noose put around his neck. And he was dragged through the streets of Boston. He was rescued. But they were going to lynch him. Did he stop? No. He kept going. He would not equivocate. He would not retreat. That kind of moral stance makes it very hard to do politics. Could you imagine Lincoln like that? No way. Lincoln would work with anybody. One of Lincoln's best friends in Congress was Alexander Stevens, who went on to become the Confederate vice president. Lincoln opposed slavery from his earliest days. He thought slavery was wrong. At the same time that he was friends with Stevens, he cast, he said, over 40 votes in favor of the Wilmot proviso to keep slavery out of the territories conquered from Mexico. A war that Lincoln opposed. Well, Stevens supported. There's no question about Lincoln's values. But he would work with people. And that's the second track towards abolition. The political track. The people who would compromise, work with others, build coalitions, and elect people to office. Abolition needed both tracks. It needed the moral campaigners like Garrison to keep the politicians honest. And it needed the politicians to actually do something. Because Garrison, with his burning the Constitution and his refusal to participate in a government that was a compact with the devil, Garrison could never accomplish abolition. He didn't have a program for it. His program persuaded people to free the slaves. Oh, give me a break. If we're up to Garrison and the moral absolutists around him, we'd solve slavery. We'd have slavery in Massachusetts, as well as South Carolina. These guys were never going to accomplish slavery. If it was left to Lincoln and his political compromises, then we may still have slavery. Lincoln would have kept slavery out of the territories, wouldn't have touched slavery where it was because it was protected by the Constitution, and would have waited. And we'd still be waiting. You needed both. When Lincoln came to office, he was not going to touch slavery where it existed, except in the District of Columbia. He was very clear about that. And he told the Southerners, you don't need to worry about me. I'm not going to touch slavery where it is. I'm just going to keep it out of the territories and abolish it in the District of Columbia, which is no big deal. The Southerners, though, looked past Lincoln to the Garrisons, and they saw where it was going. They saw where Lincoln was going to be going, because Lincoln was walking hand in hand with the Absolutus. It's that coalition of moral certitude and political effectiveness that would eventually bring down slavery because it provoked the other side. Here we have the irony. If the South hadn't overreacted, then maybe we'd still have slavery. If they hadn't seceded, we never would have had contraband. We never would have had the Emancipation Proclamation, and we never would have had the 13th Amendment. The North was never going to go to war to end slavery in the South unless the South struck first. So that's abolition. What are the lessons for today? Not sure, but we can all look at, study, and come to our own conclusions. Thank you. Have a good day. Bye-bye.