“The methods and limitations of Garrisonian abolitionism reflected the movement’s reasonable public relations concerns. Still an embattled minority in the north, white antislavery activists believed that the ultimate triumph of their cause depended on the gradual conversion of their neighbors to it. For them to rail against northern prejudice and the plight of free blacks in their own communities or to encourage slave revolt would only alienate the moderate whites whose support they hoped to enlist. But it was not only strategy that wedded most white abolitionists to peaceful moral appeal and made them willing patiently to await the blessing of Providence on their efforts. Intellectually, religiously, their opposition to slavery was genuine, even fervent. Yet slavery remained for them an abstraction, an emblem of evil rather than a lived human experience. Black people remained an abstraction, too, a collective object of pity and, inevitably, of condescension. For white antislavery activists, abolitionism was a campaign to save others: to save an alien race that suffering, simplicity, or natural passivity rendered helpless, to save the souls of slaveholders from eternal corruption by greed. It was not, however, a struggle to save themselves”