American Experience The Abolitionists: Part 3 (1988– ) watch online HD

I am a retired American history teacher and have long loved the PBS historical documentaries. They are among the very best of their kind and have set the standard for excellence. However, even among these films, "The Abolitionists" stands above most all of them in quality and watchability. While the Burns brothers have gained greater fame than Rob Rapley, Rapley creates an even more compelling portrait of a bygone era. Using not only the usual pan and scan photos, narration and interviews with various historians, he also has actors dressed in period settings acting out what you are hearing about on the screen...and you get to hear the words of these great Americans. Short of using a time machine to jump back through the 19th century, I cannot imagine a better way to bring all this to life.

This episode finds the abolitionist movement becoming more radicalized as well as the North finally starting to buy into the movement's ideals. Among the many topics covered are Bleeding Kansas and John Brown's involvement in it, Harper's Ferry, the caning of Charles Sumner, the beginning of the Civil War, Lincoln as an anti-abolitionist, Lincoln's change of heart, the end of the war and the deaths of several of the earliest abolitionists. Interestingly, the war itself was only talked about briefly and the bulk of the show about events leading to it. Again, this is a brilliantly made and eminently educational and entertaining show...one of the best.

Another informative episode in an exceptional series. This program covers basically events after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. He won not a single slave state. The deep South seceded at once. The a second block of marginal states like Virginia and Tennessee. A number of slave states hung in the balance.

The abolitionists were disgusted that Lincoln didn't immediately declare slavery illegal. William Lloyd Garrison was disgusted with Lincoln. Frederick Douglass was disgusted with both Garrison and Lincoln. Some of that rancor remains today but I don't understand why so many intelligent critics can't see what Lincoln saw.

The Civil War was being fought by BOTH sides as an issue of states' rights. Lincoln wanted to preserve the union. The Confederacy wanted to cancel its membership in what it viewed as a kind of gentleman's club. Of course, for the South, it was to preserve a slave economy that supported a wealthy aristocracy. The most important "right" of the states, from their point of view, was the preservation of slavery.

But four slave-holding states had not seceded: Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky. And that's all Lincoln had to do was turn it into a war to free the slaves. He'd be fighting a Civil War against four MORE states. And that's not counting the racism among many Northerners who genuinely believed in the union -- with or without slavery. It seems like two plus two to me, yet Lincoln still gets barbs from the left for not outlawing slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation that, in itself, only granted freedom to some slaves, not all.

The program slights Lincoln too by dismissing his notion of sending slaves somewhere else because America was a "one-race nation." Of course it sounds bent now, but the importing of slaves had stopped only forty years earlier. Some undoubtedly still had family in Africa, and slavery was outlawed everywhere else in the Western hemisphere. It was one of several reasons behind the Mexican-American war. I hope future historians are easier on us than we are on Lincoln.

In any case, the Emancipation Proclamation was greeted with joy among the abolitionists. It freed all the slaves in the South, on paper. Now all that needed to be done was to win the war. Blacks were enlisted in the army. Douglass' two sons joined, as did Garrison's first born son. The Emanicipation Proclamation had freed the slaves but it didn't make slavery illegal. The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution did that immediately after the war.

The consequences of slavery, in my opinion, are still with us. The insults of the past have been carried through generations and created a self-conscious group of victims. African-Americans now have a solidarity that most white people don't. There remains a wall between the races. On both sides of the wall, it's "us" against "them." We seem unable to breach the wall.