Leonard Bacon: New England Reformer and Antislavery Moderate.

Leonard Bacon: New England Reformer and Antislavery Moderate. By Hugh Davis. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi, 293. $60.00, ISBN 0-8071-2287-4.)

Hugh Davis has written an engaging study of Leonard Bacon (1802-1881). Though overlooked by other biographers, Bacon was an important figure in the nineteenth-century colonization, antislavery, temperance, evangelical benevolence, and nativist movements. A prolific writer, he wrote for numerous religious periodicals and, during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, was influential among northern Protestants as an editor and contributor to the New Englander and the New York Independent, and as a regular columnist for the Congregationalist.

He spent his first decade in the Old Northwest, where his parents were missionaries; subsequently they returned to New England, where he attended Yale and Andover Theological Seminary. The Missouri crisis and Bacon's Andover education exacerbated his dislike for slavery, fueling activism that resulted in Bacon's admission to the American Colonization Society's inner circle at age twenty-one. He soon entered the Congregational ministry and labored as the pastor of New Haven's Center Church for over four decades, which pulpit also served as a springboard for his reform interests.

Bacon's views of colonization reflected those of the northern wing of the movement. Believing that free blacks' inferior social standing resulted from white racism, Bacon held that blacks' relocation to Liberia would uplift them and promote the spread of Protestantism. Though he opposed slavery and racial prejudice, Bacon eschewed immediatism and never championed black equality. His advocacy of gradual abolition and his acceptance of the concept of the "good slaveholder" (which held that only the abusive behaviors associated with slaveholding were sinful, not slaveholding itself), often put him at odds with radical abolitionists. Occasionally, though, Bacon found himself aligned with antislavery radicals--such as when he endorsed the "higher law" doctrine, denounced the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and, after the Civil War, supported the execution of Jefferson Davis. Because of these positions and because Bacon occasionally endeavored to have national benevolent societies take decisive stands against slavery, white southerners and proslavery northerners invariably saw Bacon as a radical. Thus the author's designation of Bacon as an antislavery moderate is especially appropriate. Despite his occasional alliances with radicals, Bacon invariably favored incremental reform and believed that radical change threatened the social order.

Though much of his activism focused on moral reform or paralleled the issues and crises of nineteenth-century sectionalism, Bacon also engaged in a number of theological and denominational wranglings that Davis examines carefully. His penchant for controversy notwithstanding, Bacon was at heart a conciliator and, regardless of the dispute, strove for the middle ground. Davis emphasizes Bacon's centrist tendency and persuasively traces the roots of this temperament to Bacon's childhood and Andover education.

Davis also breathes life into his subject by providing the appropriate balance between Bacon's personal and private lives. This fine book illustrates how biography can highlight the interconnections among nineteenth-century religion, reform, and politics.

JOHN W. QUIST

Shippensburg University