• @[email protected]
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    -134 months ago

    And your source for that is? Abolitionists were inherently secretive, due to the nature of their work freeing slaves. It’s impossible to know their exact numbers, as no one would admit to it even after the war.

    So any source you might find is just guessing as to their numbers.

    • @PugJesusOPM
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      4 months ago

      Abolitionists were inherently secretive

      Abolitionists openly operated papers in the North. They were a major part of the Republican Party at the time, especially amongst the so-called Radical Republicans.

      as no one would admit to it even after the war.

      … many literally did admit to it after the war. Many admitted to it during the war.

      • @[email protected]
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        -114 months ago

        So no source for their numbers? I have DuBois’s own words saying people in the North didn’t care about black people. Where’s your proof?

        • @PugJesusOPM
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          134 months ago

          I have DuBois’s own words saying people in the North didn’t care about black people. Where’s your proof?

          You have Dubois saying

          they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?

          in reference to how even polite Northerners still saw African-Americans in terms of being an ‘issue’ that needed to be addressed, even if they phrased it positively. He was not seen as a ‘fellow American’, but still othered, even if in an innocently insensitive way.

          For those curious, this is a more full quote:

          Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

          So no source for their numbers?

          Radical Republicans made up the majority of the Republican majority by 1864 in the Civil War. That would mandate a plurality of voters in at least a quarter of the nation’s electoral districts. Arguably, they made up an outright majority of Congress, which would mandate a plurality of voters in at least half of the nation’s electoral districts.

    • @Rolando
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      94 months ago

      Abolitionists were inherently secretive, due to the nature of their work freeing slaves

      You seem to be confusing the abolitionist movement, which involved public meetings and newspapers, with the “conductors” of the underground railroad, who were mostly free African-Americans who risked being enslaved by slave catchers (even if they had never been enslaved in their lives.)