Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America.

Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America. Edited by John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, c. 1999. Pp. [x], 322. $30.00, ISBN 1-57233-059-7.)

The essays collected in Antislavery Violence comprise an important addition to the scholarship on abolition. Dedicated, appropriately, to Herbert Aptheker, the volume should lead readers to appreciate more fully the role of violence in abolition, both as a dimension of antislavery thought and as a practical, organizing factor in the movement itself. The volume begins with a fine introduction providing an overview of the existing scholarship on anti-slavery violence, as well as an account of the historical role of violence in abolition. The subsequent essays then consider the topic from a variety of angles. Two, by Douglas Egerton and Junius Rodriguez, examine early nineteenth-century slave revolts and document the influence of the Haitian Revolution on slaves and slaveholders alike. Essays by James Brewer Stewart and Chris Padgett then focus on Ohio abolitionists, especially the fiery Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings, to illustrate an openness to antislavery violence, including slave revolt, sharply at odds with a view of abolition that mainly emphasizes Garrisonian themes of nonresistance. Complementing Padgett's piece in particular, Carol Wilson's essay shows how violent resistance to the kidnapping of accused fugitives--much of it involving black "vigilance committees"--helped to galvanize antislavery sentiment while encouraging the movement as a whole toward a more violent position.

Several of the essays also help to root abolitionist ideas in a larger cultural framework. Stanley Harrold and John Stauffer use literary evidence to draw important connections between abolitionist ideas about violence and abolitionists' views of manhood. In doing so, they emphasize that, for all their radicalism, abolitionists themselves were far from immune to primitivist, romantic notions widely diffused in mid-nineteenth-century American culture. Kristen A. Tegtmeier similarly looks at women's roles in the Kansas civil war to show how important questions about mid-nineteenth-century gender conventions were raised by connections the crisis created between antislavery warfare and antislavery ideas. Finally, two valuable case studies by James H. Cook and John McKivigan analyze the surprisingly complex role of violence in the career of Frederick Douglass and in abolitionists' responses to John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid.

Despite the great variety in the essays, the volume is surprisingly unified. Helping to shape it, moreover, are two issues that, in particular, will be of great interest to a wide range of historians. One has to do with the real prevalence of violent ideas among abolitionists, the extent to which these represented a far-from-minor strain in antislavery thought, going well back into the history of the movement. The other has to do with the intimate connections between violence and issues of race both within abolition and as an element of the antislavery cause. Although it has been customary, as the editors document in their introduction, to see a violent turn to abolitionism beginning in about 1850, these essays demonstrate that traditions of violence go back much farther. The early calls for violence by such figures as David Walker and, by the end of the 1840s, Henry Highland Garnet, have, of course, long been discussed. But these essays help us see that even these calls did not occur in a vacuum. By the time the crises of the 1850s began to make violence, as such, increasingly a part of sectional tensions, an extensive set of ideas, images, and even actions had already laid the groundwork for the kinds of desperate acts that would ultimately reach their apogee in John Brown's raid.

Race and color were always a part of the calculation. The essays in this book serve an important purpose in helping to discount an older view--still quite prevalent and that surfaces now and again here, as well--that black abolitionists came to see a necessity for violent action prior to their white counterparts. The authors indicate the extent to which violence, contemplated and experienced, served as an important force for self-identity for white as well as black abolitionists. They also show that, while tendencies toward "Romantic Racialism" had the potential of separating white abolitionists from black, these tendencies were often far less meaningful than the possibilities for combined action often created by violent confrontation with slavery and its defenders. Here was to be an important locus for black and white involvement within the movement. Here, too, was to be a locus for bridging gaps between black and white abolitionists that might otherwise have limited what the movement could hope to achieve. In all, then, this is a valuable book, one that will do much to give us a deeper understanding of abolition and its significance.

DICKSON D. BRUCE JR.
University of California, Irvine