at the University of Bonn, The New School, and the University of Virginia.
The prize committee praised Dr. Cirillo's book as follows: "In an extraordinarily nuanced and well-written analysis of abolitionists, Frank J. Cirillo’s The Abolitionists Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union assessed how these men and women acted during the war that ended slavery.
Even the abolitionists who had fought so hard to end slavery had to recalibrate their assumptions and expectations on how to achieve their goals amidst the unprecedented transformations wrought by a massive war. In this ambitious study, Cirillo found that these ideologues, specifically those who had advocated for the immediate end of slavery, divided on the verge of achieving their most dearly held ambition.
On the one hand, some of these men and women continued their allegiance to immediate and radical action to end slavery to ensure America’s moral redemption. Those who stayed true to immediatism rejected political maneuvering because they believed achieving abolition by political means corrupted their movement.
On the other hand, some immediatists joined the political fray and supported the Republican Party to achieve their purpose. These interventionists were willing to sacrifice the purity of their movement to ensure slavery's end. Cirillo argues that the unrepentant immediatists' predictions came true; interventionists’ political allegiances resulted in their sacrifice of racial justice because they had identified their movement with the Republican Party and its limited vision of emancipation, which rejected both the need for white redemption and black equality.
Lincoln understood the reason for this realignment when, in the Second Inaugural Address, he asserted, 'Neither [side] anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.' If the people most likely to support African American social, civil, and political rights embraced black freedom as defined by white racist partisans during this cataclysm, then the formerly enslaved had little chance of fully realizing the benefits of emancipation.
This book contributes significantly to understanding the United States’ failure to make emancipation more meaningful despite the realization of immediatists' decades-long dedication to the slave's cause."
Text Dource: https://lsupress.org/9780807179154/the-abolitionist-civil-war/
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