Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America.

Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. By Fergus M. Bordewich. (New York: HarperCollins, Amistad, c. 2005. Pp. xx, 540. $27.95, ISBN 0-06-052430-8.)

John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery' Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. By David S. Reynolds. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Pp. x, 578. $35.00, ISBN 0-375-41188-7.)

These bold and lively narratives seek to reinforce what was called in the sixties a "usable past," an approach wherein radical dissenters altered American history in progressive directions. In our current hyper-conservative public climate, discussion of such alternative visions can be quite refreshing. However, in the end both of these books serve to reinforce an undeserved liberal, even Whiggish, idea that the history of American race relations has been, after all, an upward movement against prejudice and discrimination, pushed along the way by the actions of deeply committed and daring activists.

In Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America, Fergus M. Bordewich, a well-informed journalist, compiles an impressively thorough synthesis of the long history of what he ca/Is one of the most "romantic ... episodes in the nation's history" (p. 3). Often using fiercely presentist language, Bordewich considers the Underground Railroad to have been "the country's first racially integrated civil rights movement" and the "first great movement of civil disobedience since the American Revolution" (pp. 4, 5). He also portrays the movement as "democracy in action ... with a minimum of central direction and a maximum of grassroots involvement" (p. 5).

Most of what follows is less grandiose than the introductory pitching of this thesis for a popular readership. Bordewich has gathered together the work of many local historians that is often ignored by professional historians and has read quite broadly in the wider historical literature. He presents a history of the controversy over slavery that, if familiar, is well done. And he demonstrates the way the Underground Railroad must have worked by disparate cells, unified only by a compelling grand strategic goal. Most significantly, he emphasizes the role of black abolitionists, where earlier discussions tended to focus on whites. And he delves into the ways in which deeply religious abolitionists would have been drawn to this subversive theater of action as a companion to their agitation against slavery by other, less dramatic means. Particularly strong is Bordewich's dialectical rendering of the fear and anger that the Underground Railroad provoked in the South, which led to draconian legislation that eroded the rights of white Americans in the North, pushing them into resistance, and thus contributing to the onset of civil war. And he is particularly apt in his analysis of the escaped slave communities in Upper Canada.

By the late nineteenth century, aging participants in the Underground Railroad were quite keen to immortalize their dashing pasts for future generations. When they gave interviews or wrote memoirs, they doubtless exaggerated their role and the systemic qualities of their youthful activities. Given the secretive nature of and the lack of primary sources produced by their cells, Bordewich can only write his narrative from often legendary memoirs. Unfortunately, he rarely approaches such sources with sufficient skepticism (of the sort that Larry Gara brought to the topic a decade ago), nor does he acknowledge in the text that his colorful stories were refracted through this often distorting lens. Memoirs, in themselves worthy of study as a genre of storytelling, are hardly eyewitness accounts. Bordewich also interviewed descendants of these romantic radicals, although it is unclear from his notes whether he took family mythology as an indicator of historical accuracy.

Also disappointing is a rather cloying aura of celebration through which Bordewich seeks to make modern moral lessons from a past that is quite different from the present. Without doubting for a moment the horrors of slavery and of northern as well as southern white racism, Bordewich wants to believe that "our ancestors were not always enemies across an unbridgeable chasm of color" and indeed were capable of "heroic collaboration" (p. 438). Bordewich makes that all too common great leap from the 1860s to the 1960s when he claims that this heroic collaboration would reap its "ultimate fruits [in] the struggle ... of the civil rights movement" (p. 439, emphasis added).

Using similar temporal telescoping, the distinguished literary historian David S. Reynolds concludes that John Brown's activities led to the election of Abraham Lincoln and a conclusive war, "which set the stage for the North's victory, America's prosperity and strength, and the passage of the constitutional amendments that eventually led to civil rights" (p. 472, emphasis added). Reynolds endorses the unambiguous words of W. E. B. Du Bois: "John Brown was right" (p. 506). The end justified the means; full stop.

Reynolds is a lively and argumentative writer, and much of this text advances our understanding of John Brown. His portrayal of Brown's difficult business and personal life are perhaps the clearest in the literature. Reynolds has a considerable understanding of Brown's religiosity, and his discussions of the impact Brown made on both northerners and southerners is quite original. Indeed, where many southern white men saw Brown as an ogre, Reynolds argues convincingly that others recognized themselves in Brown, refracted through violent action as "the Southern gentleman in Abolitionist dress" (p. 333). And Reynolds makes the compelling point that "it was the idea of John Brown that terrorized the South," leading them to panic over the election of the Republicans and to secede, thus cutting their own necks (p. 195).

Reynolds is a thorough scholar, but he tends to go off on long, special-pleading sorts of digressions. In particular, he is eager to demonstrate that the Transcendentalists (subjects included in his earlier work on the American Renaissance) had a great impact on northern opinion in their support of Brown. But even Henry David Thoreau pointed out that Brown himself was the eloquent stage manager of his own martyrdom.

If any historical figure presents complex moral problems to the historian, it ought to be John Brown, and here Reynolds follows a rather complacent road. "Because slavery was a uniquely immoral institution," any action to subvert or destroy it was justified (p. 503). Yes, Brown was a murderer who took innocent lives at Pottawatomie, Reynolds concedes, but "It]he most positive way to view ... Brown's crimes is to regard them as what Doris Lessing calls 'good terrorism'--that is, terrorism justified by obvious social injustice" (p. 165). Reynolds understands that he is saying essentially that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And he argues in several ways that for the South, such racial terrorism was the proverbial chickens coming home to roost. In this vein, he compares Brown to Malcolm X.

Moral simplifications also characterize Reynold's reading of the horrific Civil War: "I agree with John Brown [that] ... [w]ar was needed to rid the nation of slavery" and that Brown was a prophet of a "good" war (pp. 439, 442). That is, when the war became antislavery it became John Brown's war. Reynolds does not analyze the material and human costs of the Civil War in his Unionist triumphalism.

Reynolds barely mentions the eight decades after the Civil War, when violent apartheid defined race relations in the South and systematic prejudice and discrimination defined them in the North as well. Instead of calculating such costs, Reynolds abstracts Brown from history as a heroic figure, a man who "disrupted the racist juggernaut" and who can serve as a beacon to righteous activism today. "There must be modern Americans who identify with the oppressed with such passion that they are willing to die for them, as Brown did" (p. 505). Reynolds systematically diminishes Brown's dark side, flattening him into a modern moral paragon. Most assuredly, this is a post-September 11 recounting of John Brown, although I am not certain Reynolds has thought through his proposal.

Each of these books is a curious blend of radical critique and liberal smugness. Like much current scholarship, they celebrate war, particularly the Civil War, as the most American means to solving social problems. If the Civil War ended slavery it did so at enormous costs, and the aftermath was terrible--generations of white supremacy enforced through violence. To say that the Underground Railroad and John Brown eventually led to civil rights denies that long intervening period of antiblack terrorism, and it also suggests that current American race relations are essentially good. So, isn't it great how we got from there to here? Adding radical heroes to the warriors' pantheon compounds, through moral under-examination, the ascendancy of militarist thinking in liberal as well as conservative circles--a usable past indeed.

MICHAEL FELLMAN

Simon Fraser University