Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War. By Philip F. Gura

Abstract

Philip F. Gura’s lucid and engaging Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War begins with the Panic of 1837 and concludes in the aftermath of John Brown’s 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry. Gura argues that the former inspired a “quixotic” culture of reform that, frustrated by failure, ultimately curdled into the latter (2). The reformers in question represent the mostly elite cliques that emerged from the salons, colleges, churches, and communes of antebellum New England and New York. Despite their wide-ranging philosophical and political concerns, Gura suggests that his subjects shared a commitment to “the national ethic of self-reliance.” Rather than confront the structural causes of their era’s crises, he writes, reformers endeavored to fix “their countrymen’s moral shortcomings” through “moral suasion and self-discipline” (3). Gura does not hide his disdain for their approach and candidly judges his subjects as “extravagant and foolhardy,” and, later, “misguided” (18, 266).