"Knives in Their Heads": Passionate Self-Analysis and the Search for Identity in American Abolitionism

Abstract

Robert H. Abzug. Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld & the Dilemma of Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. 370 + xi pp. Lawrence J. Friedman. Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.344 + xi pp. Lewis Perry. Childhood, Marriage, and Reform: Henry Clarke Wright 1797-1870. Chicago:' The University of Chicago Press, 1980.359 + xiv pp. Peter F. Walker. Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth Century American Abolition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. 387 + xxii pp. Between the early 1960s and mid-1970s the major scholarly break-throughs in the study of American abolitionism occurred in the study of ideology. The work of John L. Thomas, Aileen Kraditor, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Perry, James B. Stewart and Ronald Walters (among others) was critically important in analyzing the complexities of abolitionist thought which called for immediate repentance from the sin of slavery and the elevation of blacks "to an intellectual, moral and political equality with the whites."1 Abolition- ism, which emerged from the evangelical revivals of the 1820s (although most evangelical Protestants did not embrace abolitionism), radicalized many traditional Protestant ideas or doctrines in promoting the cause of the slave— e.g., millennialism, the sovereignty of God and the moral government of God. In essence, the sin of slavery was not merely the brutalization of human beings, but that enslavement prevented blacks from being "free moral agents." As the constitution of the Lane Seminary Anti-Slavery Society phrased it, God created the black man as "a moral agent, the keeper of his own happiness, the executive of his own powers, the accountable arbiter of his own choice." Slavery "stifle[d] the moral affections, repress[ed] the innate longings of the spirit, paralyze[d] conscience, turn[ed] hope to despair, and kill[ed] the soul." It also destroyed the family, aroused feelings of "despera- tion and revenge, provoke[d] insurrection, and peril[ed] public safety." It "foment[ed] division and alienation in our public councils, and put in jeopardy the existence of the union"; and it paralyzed "all missionary effort" and "expos[ed] the nation to the judgment of God" (Abzug, pp. 92-93).