Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America by Suzanne Cooper Guasco (review)

Abstract

Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America. By Suzanne Cooper Guaseo. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. Pp. 293. Paper, $28.95.)Reviewed by W. Caleb McDanielTo many historians, the American Revolution's legacies have seemed weak compared to later organized abolitionism. The refusal of founding patriots to act on professions of liberty stunted true abolitionism until the rise of immediatism in the 1830s and politics in the 1840s, or so the story once went. But in her well-written and deeply researched book Confronting Slavery, Suzanne Cooper Guaseo joins recent scholarship in arguing for important continuities and between the Revolutionary impulse and the Antebellum political (7).Guaseo illuminates these connections through the life of Edward Coles, who grew up in a household frequented by Patrick Henry, James Monroe, and James Madison. Bom in 1786 to a wealthy slaveholding planter in Virginia, Coles lived to see slavery destroyed by civil war. By that time, Guaseo argues, he had worked for abolition whole life in a career that ranged from Virginia to Illinois to Pennsylvania and transformed him from slaveholder to advocate of what Guaseo calls antislavery nationalism.Coles determined early in life to act on what he understood to be the implications of the nation's founding principles, embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Guaseo traces Coles's to career as a student at William and Mary, where (on the back of some 1806 notes) he recorded deepening conviction that Slavery 8c Justice are contradictory and reciprocally exclusive of each other (27). In 1809, Coles toured the Ohio River Valley and began dreaming of moving to the Old Northwest and freeing the approximately twenty people he inherited upon father's death.Coles deferred those plans for a decade while working as private secretary to President Madison, friend and mentor. But beliefs did not fade. Coles saw the military liability slavery posed during the War of 1812, and friendship with Quaker abolitionist Roberts Vaux confirmed instincts. On an official mission to Russia, Coles found further proof that American slavery blotted the nation's reputation and exceeded in depravity the serfdom of the Old World. In 1814, Coles famously wrote to Jefferson urging him and the nation's revered Fathers to lead a movement for gradual emancipation (64).When in 1819, Coles finally did move to the Northwest as Register of the Land Office at Edwardsville, Illinois, he at last fulfilled his longheld determination to manumit enslaved inheritance (71). The slaves who traveled with Coles from Virginia settled in southwestern Illinois as free people, working on Coles's farm for wages and on small lots he gave to those over the age of twenty-three. Yet while Coles had imagined Illinois as an refuge, southern migrants hoped to introduce slavery there. He campaigned against these proslavery forces for five years, aided by eastern allies like Vaux, whose niece he later married. Especially after election as governor in 1822, Coles gained a national reputation for work to defeat an 1824 movement for a state constitutional convention to legalize slavery.That struggle honed Coles's brand of politics, built on the premise that all of the founders, nonslaveholders and slaveholders alike, had confessed their belief that slavery was morally and ideologically wrong (123). …