The Abolitionist Civil War

Winner of the 2024 Wiley-Silver Prize in Civil War History Finalist for the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize The astonishing transformation of the abolitionist movement during the Civil War proved enormously consequential both for the cause of abolitionism and for the nation at large. Drawing on a cast of famous and obscure figures from Frederick Douglass to Moncure Conway, Frank J. Cirillo’s The Abolitionist Civil War explores how immediate abolitionists contorted their arguments and clashed w