The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861 by Jesse Olsavsky (review)

Reviewed by: The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861by Jesse Olsavsky Adam Rothman The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861. By Jesse Olsavsky. Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 279. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7730-3.) Jesse Olsavsky's The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861reveals that there is still much to learn about the abolitionist movement, and much to learn from it as well. Olsavsky focuses on the work of abolitionist vigilance committees (VCs), the front lines for dedicated activists, Black and white, giving aid and protection to escapees from slavery who managed to reach the relative safety of places like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Despite being clandestine operations, VCs left behind a surprisingly rich archival record that documents the intricate, creative ties between southern freedom-seekers and the northern abolitionist movement. The vigilance committees were in the trenches of the abolitionist movement. Olsavsky estimates that they helped nearly ten thousand people escape slavery between the 1830s and the Civil War, often at great risk. This number was admittedly a tiny fraction of the country's enslaved population, and the VC members were a similarly tiny fraction of northerners. Together, though, they [End Page 159]exerted a dramatically outsized influence on culture, society, and politics in the antebellum United States. If fugitive slaves and their abolitionist allies in the VCs did not cause the Civil War, they certainly intensified the sectional crisis that brought it about. While other abolitionists debated high points of political strategy and constitutional theory, VC members engaged in what they called "practical abolitionism": direct action to help fugitives when they appeared at northern doorsteps (p. 7). This work involved organizing networks of safehouses where fugitives could hide from loitering slave-catchers and continue their journeys farther north and to Canada; mounting legal defenses of people jailed as runaways or busting them out; and taking testimony from freedom-seekers to learn about their plight and teach the northern public about the reality of enslaved life. Many escapees arriving from the slave states told their stories to VC members, who wrote them down. William Still kept a record of hundreds who came through Philadelphia, as did conductors of the Underground Railroad in New York and Boston. Altogether, Olsavsky has gathered information from roughly 1,700 interviews conducted with fugitives by the VCs, mostly from the 1850s. A few of these men and women went on to write autobiographies and memoirs themselves; the stories of many more came to light in abolitionist histories of the Underground Railroad, including Still's. But others' testimony can only be found in the handwritten notes left behind by the vigilance committees who preserved them. Eighty years before the Federal Writers' Project interviewed elderly ex-slaves, abolitionists had compiled their own oral history of slavery. Olsavsky's analysis of the testimony recorded by VC members is one of the revelations of the book. By collaborating with freedom-seekers to teach the public what they learned, the vigilance committees advanced what Olsavsky calls "abolitionist-fugitive pedagogy" (p. 14). The abolitionists who participated in direct action and mutual aid to help freedom-seekers earned advanced, if informal, degrees in the social history of slavery as well as law, politics, and morality. The lessons they learned pushed some of them in ever more radical and even revolutionary directions. Endorsing intersectionality avant la lettre, Boston Vigilance Committee member Wendell Phillips declared, "'all oppressions under the sun are linked together'" (p. 125). Olsavksy shows that the vigilance committees were an essential element of an abolitionist program of public education. The knowledge of slavery that fugitives carried with them to the North was transmitted via the vigilance committees to the northern public through lectures, newspapers, pamphlets and books, and theater and art. Fugitives took center stage—sometimes literally—in this cultural struggle. We need more scholarship on the abolitionist lecture circuit, understudied in comparison to the copious and more readily available outputs of abolitionist printed material. One gets the sense from...

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