Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America Lyde Cullen Sizer Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America. By T. Gregory Garvey. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Pp. 280. Cloth $39.95.) Creating the Culture of Reform will appeal to specialists of the antebellum period who are eager to plumb more deeply the implications of the work of well-known figures. T. Gregory Garvey has mastered the literature of the period, contemporary and scholarship alike, in multiple directions. While his subjects are the published and private writings of reformers—Lyman Beecher, William Ellery Channing, Catherine Beecher, Angelina Grimké, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson—he uses literary critics, philosophers, and historians to make sense of them. Their words, he states, have profound meaning for the development and the shape of a culture of reform, one characterized in part by a passionate embrace of sincere public speech. The shape of public discourse today, Garvey argues, was in part determined by the work of antebellum Americans. Concerned with the increasingly pluralistic society in which they lived, imagining a society of what John [End Page 87] Rawls calls “overlapping consensus,” reformers used a rejection of intentional manipulation and desire for complete sincerity to create a new space for public discourse, expand the critical public involved in that discourse, and rethink a way to discuss divisive issues. Garvey’s book is organized into a series of critical debates. He begins with the transformation of the New England ministry during and after the disestablishment of the Congregational Church. While some orthodox Congregationalist ministers refused to engage in wider discussions—remaining “rigorously biblical”—Unitarians began to acknowledge “that religious discourse is in competition with the discourses of authority represented by merchants and politicians” (38, 39). To maintain the credibility and the authority to which they were accustomed, ministers had to be well-read, rhetorically complex, and sophisticated, much as their congregations were becoming. The controversy between conservatives and liberals, Congregationalists and Unitarians, “laid the foundation for secular reform culture in several ways,” Garvey argued, ultimately defining “a spiritual form of civic humanism that counterbalanced the tendency to equate pluralism with chaos rather than with progressive dialogue” (72). In Garvey’s second chapter, he turns to a crucial early debate on women’s public role in reform: that between Angelina Grimké and her former mentor, Catharine Beecher. Grimké became, for a time, a lightening rod for the place of women in public arenas, in part because her stance and her choice to make it public reflected “the clergy’s fear that a class of morally motivated, publicly vocal women had begun to poach on the moral influence of the church” (100). Beecher, by contrast, did not object to the image of a morally motivated woman as a publicly vocal one: for her the public arena was “an inherently strategic site of struggle for domination” that made “rational dialogue oriented toward mutual understanding” impossible (110). Grimké and Beecher agreed: Women’s claim to sincerity gave them significant resources. It was where those resources were best deployed that they differed. Both William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass focused on the question of sincerity, right from the beginning of their public work of reform. Yet while Garrison moved from colonizationism to immediatism in a shift toward creating the institutional structure of the culture of reform, Douglass came to the issues with a distinct orientation toward publicity, shaped by the racial expectations of his audience. In the end, Douglass focused on the problem of equality rather than of sincerity, Garvey argues, and his position on political [End Page 88] abolitionism changed as he moved from seeing the Constitution as a “reified holy writ” toward understanding it as an “object of dialogue” (158). Lyde Cullen Sizer Sarah Lawrence College Copyright © 2009 The Kent State University Press