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

Abstract

Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America. Edited by John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Pp. 322. $30.00.) In Antislavery Violence, editors John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold have assembled ten stimulating essays likely to redirect (and reinvigorate) debate on abolition as the new century opens. The collection examines reform advocates who accepted violent means to end slavery. These are the abolitionists who, after decades of revisions and re-revisions, remain the last to be rehabilitated in scholarly literature (10). The first five essays call attention to African Americans who took the lead in accepting, defining, and enacting antislavery violence. Two articles examine the impact that black resistance in Saint Domingue had on slave communities in the United States. Douglas Egerton explains how Toussaint L'Ouverture's insurgency inspired three insurrectionary efforts in Virginia: the 1792 Norfolk conspiracy, the 1793 Secret Keeper network, and the 1800 plot devised by Gabriel. Junius Rodriguez demonstrates that events in Saint Domingue also served as a model for the 1811 German Coast Rebellion in Louisiana, an uprising that brought in the United States military and claimed the lives of 150 rebels. Stanley Harrold focuses on a later incident, the 1841 Creole mutiny led by Madison Washington, to explore why abolitionists ambivalent about black character and violent tactics celebrated news of the event. One reason, Harrold contends, may relate to the reformers' beliefs in prevailing notions of romanticism, which extolled noble, inspired, and restrained acts of heroism. Carol Wilson shows that threats of fugitive recapture, kidnapping, and violence led many African Americans more readily to accept violent resistance to the slave system. The decision not only challenged the tactics of prominent abolition societies but also defied caricatures of blacks as docile and submissive. In what may prove to be the most controversial essay in the collection, James Cook takes up Frederick Douglass's peculiar brand of activism (151), which exhibited an ever-increasing rhetoric of violence just as actual threats of violence in the reformer's life declined. Cook traces much of Douglass's thinking on the subject to the influence of John Brown. The second part of the collection focuses mainly on white abolitionists and their use of violent tactics. Two of the essays help refine existing scholarship. James Brewer Stewart asks new questions of two topics: his own research on Congressman Joshua Giddings and studies on the Yankee culture of conscience and southern codes of honor. Stewart places the latter in a legislative context and demonstrates how Giddings's agitation on slavery precipitated a series of physical encounters with other congressmen, clashes that were not merely random acts of violence in the halls of Congress but rather rituals of attack and defiance (185). Chris Padgett demonstrates the dynamic rather than static qualities of come-outerism in the Western Reserve. The militant, apocalyptic culture of come-outerism, he suggests, produced a wide variety of responses among adherents and long contained the potential for both pacifism and violence. Three other essays in the second part offer new approaches to questions of violence. Kristen A. Tegtmeier contends that Free State women who endured Bleeding Kansas experienced a profound transformation in their beliefs about violence and gender. …