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Well Before Lincoln, Enemies of Slavery
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Abraham Lincoln drew Steven Spielberg’s cinematic attention, but Lincoln was still a store clerk when William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of the newspaper The Liberator in 1831, vowing to “not retreat a single inch” in his campaign to eradicate slavery.
“The Abolitionists,” a three-part “American Experience” that begins Tuesday night on PBS, is a reminder for our noisy, instant-news present that the great movements of history, whether for civil rights or equality for women or the rights of people with disabilities, take decades to mature, and that presidents and other politicians are often among the last to board the bandwagon.
The program, so rich in well-staged re-enactments that it is more docudrama than documentary, traces the abolitionist movement across almost 40 tumultuous years, a period of colliding worldviews that makes our current polarization seem slight.
The focus is on five prominent figures with a lifelong dedication to the cause: Garrison, Angelina Grimké, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. That oversimplifies things considerably, of course — it takes more than five people to move a mountain — but the principals are well chosen in that they represent a range of approaches as to how best to rid the country of slavery. Garrison, at least in the beginning, thought words could do the job; Brown preferred the sword and the gun.
The first installment looks at the 1820s and ’30s, when the abolitionist movement coalesced and began to realize just what it was up against. Antislavery leaflets in the South were met with violent protests, which was no surprise, but Garrison and others were taken aback when ugly opposition also materialized in the North.
“The mobs shattered every abolitionist assumption: that righteousness would triumph over evil; that their fellow Americans would listen to reason; that their Northern neighbors would support the abolitionist cause,” the program’s narrator, Oliver Platt, relates.
Part 2 explores how war with Mexico in the mid-1840s accelerated the debate by raising the question of whether territory gained by the United States in that conflict would be slave or free. Douglass (portrayed in re-enactments by Richard Brooks of “Law & Order”) emerges as a major player, recruited by Garrison to speak across the North. His appearances put a face on what for many had been a theoretical discussion.
“Many of the audience members had never, ever seen a slave, let alone been to the slave South,” the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar says. “So to have a person like Douglass gave the antislavery cause teeth. It gave it authenticity. It gave it a new voice.”
Meanwhile, Garrison (portrayed by Neal Huff) was beginning to despair that political bodies or other entrenched institutions would ever act against slavery, and his writings and lectures became more impatient. The ultimate champion of radical action, though, was Brown (T. Ryder Smith), who, as Part 3 begins, is killing slavery advocates in Kansas and then setting his sights on the armory at Harpers Ferry. In the program’s most evocative scene, he meets Douglass at Chambersburg, Pa., where Douglass tries to talk him out of the raid that would help push the nation to civil war.
“It will kill you, and it will serve no purpose,” Douglass says. “It will be a blood bath.”
To which Brown replies, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin, Douglass.”
Lincoln turns up late, and in this telling he is a bit of a waffler, trying some appeasement strategies before eventually, 150 years ago this past New Year’s Day, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. By this point in the program, the case has been made that war was the only way this defining issue would be resolved. But it was a long journey to get to that point, full of soul-searching, reasoned debate and not-so-reasoned violence. Food for thought for our contentious age, when discussion of perfectly solvable problems seems to turn inflammatory so easily.
American Experience
The Abolitionists
On PBS stations on Tuesday and Sunday nights (check local listings).
Produced by Apograph Productions Inc. for American Experience. Written, directed and produced by Rob Rapley; Sharon Grimberg, executive producer; Mark Samels, executive producer for American Experience; John Chimples and Aljernon Tunsil, editors; Tim Cragg, cinematographer; Oliver Platt, narrator.
WITH: Richard Brooks (Frederick Douglass), Neal Huff (William Lloyd Garrison), Jeanine Serralles (Angelina Grimké), Kate Lyn Sheil (Harriet Beecher Stowe) and T. Ryder Smith (John Brown).
http://tv.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/art...gewanted=print