Pursuing Racial Justice in 19th Century America: The Story of John Albion Andrew

Dr. Michael Horswell engages in conversation with Dr. Stephen Engle, an award-winning history professor with over 32 years of experience in teaching and writing about nineteenth-century America.

This episode of In Conversation delves into Dr. Engle's new book, In Pursuit of Justice: The Life of John Albion Andrew.  Stephen and Dr. Horswell discuss John Albion's one profoundly radical idea: that all men truly are created equal. He championed lost causes, loathed America’s racial prejudices, and sought justice for the lowly, even when the fight was wholly unpopular. His story (from the 1830s through the 1860s) places slavery and abolition at the center of America’s history and affirms that a life driven by justice and conviction can be timeless.

Like Lincoln, his career was a reminder of the national tragedy that ensued from standing up for such beliefs, as opposing factions shaped divergent paths toward their vision of the “more perfect Union” that the founding fathers had charted in the Constitution. Throughout his life Andrew watched as the expanding republic struggled to endure half slave and half free. He recognized that slavery was incompatible with the Christian notion of inalienable human rights (as well as free-market capitalism), yet he lived in a strident era when sectionalism was shaping questions of territorial development and challenging Americans to decide whether God or man had relegated African Americans to human chattel. Slavery’s expansion heightened the young idealist’s political awareness.

When the Civil War erupted just four months into his first term, Andrew considered the conflict not only a contest to restore the Union but also to advance the progress of the human condition in America. He advocated for emancipation during the war and persuaded the Lincoln administration to allow him to raise all-black regiments to fight for the Union and thereby demonstrate African American fitness for citizenship.

Andrew spent his life following Theodore Parker’s axiom. “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one,” said Parker, “my eye reaches but little ways, I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight: I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”  Andrew saw the war as the opportunity to redefine the republic by embracing racial progress by ending slavery and bending the arm of the moral universe. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. would repeat Parker’ words more than 100 years later in seeking racial justice. 

Dr. Stephen Engle  has received numerous awards throughout his career including being named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians, a Fulbright Scholar for a year, a Gilder Lehrman Fellow, and a Huntington Library Fellow. He has lectured extensively in the United States and Germany, has appeared in c-span's Lectures in American History, and most recently lectures for the Smithsonian Institution as a part of the Smithsonian Associates Program. He is widely published in the genre of 19th Century American, having authored numerous books, essays, articles, and reviews including the prizing-winningGathering to Save a Nation (2016) and In Pursuit of Justice: The Life of John Albion Andrew (2023).