British Unitarians against American Slavery, 1833-1865 (review)

Abstract

182CIVIL WAR history While the letters include short comments on such current events as the 1863 draft riots in New York, they are slim pickings for subjects other than the Whitman family and engineering matters. Although it was edited with loving care, it is not a book for the general scholar of nineteenth-century life in the United States. IronicallyJeffWhitman, who is little remembered today, gained a national reputation before his more famous brotherbecame well known. As the editors point out, the publication of these letters will very likely provide the only biography ofa man who made substantial contributions to his profession and whose closeness to our greatest poet merits recognition. Larry Gara Wilmington College British Unitarians against American Sfovery, 1833-1865. By Douglas Charles Stange. (Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. Pp. 259. $29.50.) British Unitarians against American Sfovery, 1833-1865 is the first significant monograph concerning the reaction of a British religious denomination toward American slavery and the Civil War. Although British Unitarians trace their beginnings from c. 1660, they numbered probably no more than sixty thousand, some two hundred years later. Generally speaking, the British Unitarians were a well-educated, affluent, articulate, and influential group. They were, as were their coreligionists in America, associated with a variety of reform activities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Among those issues which elicited their support were women's rights, education, suffrage, temperance, antislavery, and others. Stange implies that a possible motive for their interest in reform was an effort to gain "status," a motive also ascribed by some to American reformers both before and after the Civil War. One reform activity which these affluent humanitarians shunned was seeking changes that would alleviate the poverty and despair, and would improve the quality oflife for the industrial working class in Britain. They devoted their attention and energies to a problem thirty-five hundred miles from their home (the abolition ofslavery in the United States) rather than to social and economic problems in Lancashire and other nearby places, because "slavery was the crime above all crimes" (147) in western society. The response of British Unitarians to American slavery was similar to that of the abolitionists in the United States; they were divided into moderate and radical or Garrisonian factions. The focus ofattention in this study is on the British disciples ofWilliam Lloyd Garrison. Their activities included writing antislavery tracts and books, publishing sermons and editorials which denounced slavery, circulating abolitionist petitions, and book reviews183 sending antislavery resolutions to their coreligionists and others in the United States. By 1855 the antislavery activities of British Unitarians were declining. One oftheir ablest spokesmen died that year; also by this time a number of British abolitionists had given up hope ofredeeming America from the sin ofslavery. With the new Fugitive Slave Act, violence in Kansas, the defeat of Freemont, and the Dred Scott decision—it seemed to many in Britain that the slave power was firmly in control in America and would probably continue for an indefinite time. The author claims that during the Civil War most Unitarians, as well as others in Britain, were neutral; however, he notes one Unitarian clergyman who advocated that the British government recognize the Confederacy . The Emancipation Proclamation elicited a mixed reaction, but the defeat ofthe Confederacy and the addition ofthe Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution stimulated British Unitarians to undertake activities designed to help the American freedmen. Although this study is sympathetic to the British Unitarians, it is not uncritical. It offers an encapsulated history of the Unitarian movement in Britain and of their leading spokesmen, together with an account of their interaction with American Unitarians in the antebellum years. It is a welcome contribution to an understanding ofBritish church history in the nineteenth century and to the transatlantic antislavery movement. It is hoped, and expected, that Stange's monograph will stimulate similar ones pertaining to other British churches. W. Harrison Daniel University ofRichmond Grourtng Up in the 1850s: TheJournal ofAgnes Lee . Edited by Mary Custis Lee DeButts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Pp. XX, 145. $11.95.) Eleanor Agnes Lee, the fifth child ofRobert Edward Lee and Mary Anne...