Jesse
Olsavsky’s The Most Absolute Abolition tells the dramatic
story of how vigilance committees organized the Underground Railroad
and revolutionized the abolitionist movement. These groups, based
primarily in northeastern cities, defended Black neighborhoods from
police and slave catchers. As the urban wing of the Underground
Railroad, they helped as many as ten thousand refugees, building an
elaborate network of like-minded sympathizers across boundaries of
nation, gender, race, and class.
Olsavsky reveals how the committees cultivated a movement of ideas
animated by a motley assortment of agitators and intellectuals,
including famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman,
and Henry David Thoreau, who shared critical information with one
another. Formerly enslaved runaways—who grasped the economy of
slavery, developed their own political imaginations, and communicated
strategies of resistance to abolitionists—serve as the book’s
central focus. The dialogues between fugitives and abolitionists
further radicalized the latter’s tactics and inspired novel forms
of feminism, prison reform, and utopian constructs. These notions
transformed abolitionism into a revolutionary movement, one at the
heart of the crises that culminated in the Civil War.