Calvin Colton

Calvin Colton was a nineteenth-century American clergyman and political writer whose work documents a vehement Northern opposition to immediate emancipation. Abolition a Sedition argues that organized abolitionism threatened constitutional government and social order. Project Gutenberg identifies Colton, places the work in the antebellum period, and records its subjects as slavery and abolitionists in the United States. Open Library separately records the 1839 G. W. Donohue edition, labeling the book controversial literature about slavery and abolitionists. Modern historical scholarship treats the book as proslavery controversial literature rather than a neutral description of the abolition movement. Its claims should therefore be read as evidence of the fears, racial ideology, and political arguments used against reform, not as reliable judgments about abolitionists. Colton's polemic also shows how religious language and constitutional reasoning could be enlisted to defend an unjust status quo. Readers consulting Abolition a Sedition encounter a primary source whose value lies in exposing the rhetoric of resistance to antislavery activism.