The majority of white abolitionists and the majority of suffragists worked hard to convince their compatriots that the changes they advocated were not revolutionary. Far from undermining the accepted distribution of power, their reforms would eliminate deviations from the democratic principle upon which it was based. Non-Garrisonian abolitionists repeatedly disavowed miscegenation and revolutionary intentions. As for the suffragists, despite the presence in the movement of socialists, and in the final years of a few blacks, immigrants, and workers, the racism and nativism in the movement's thinking were not an aberration and did not conflict with the movement's objective of suffrage. Far from saying, as presentist historians do, that the white abolitionists and suffragists compromised the abiding principles of equality and the equal right of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, just the opposite is suggested: the non-Garrisonian majority of white abolitionists and the majority of suffragists showed what those principles meant in their respective generations, because they traced the farthest acceptable boundaries around them.