Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert

Abstract

Reviewed by: Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert Kate Culkin (bio) Abolitionism, Puritanism, Slavery Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination. By Kenyon Gradert. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 256. Cloth, $50.00.) [End Page 310] In this nimble, innovative monograph, Kenyon Gradert makes a compelling case for the role Puritans played in the rhetoric and imagination of American abolitionists. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he traces the complex ways a diverse group of reformers and authors invoked a vision of their ancestors—literal and figurative—as fiery, principled warriors to push for the end of slavery. Along the way, he makes notable contributions to the fields of nineteenth-century American literature, the history of abolition, and the use of historical memory. Central to Gradert's argument is the claim that abolitionists' Puritans differ dramatically from the twenty-first-century vison of dour, conservative, and repressed forefathers developed out of Cold War and New Americanist analyses. For the abolitionists, he claims, "the Puritans' militant zeal acquired a new value in light of an increasingly belligerent slave power and a complicit North" (7). They reached to the past to frame their cause as a holy war and add it to a timeline for the country that stretched from Puritans' principled stand through the American Revolution and towards a glorious future. For Gradert, the accuracy of their portrayal is not important; the significance lies in how these reformers chose to depict Puritans and what that depiction reveals about their thought-process and their time. Gradert combines biographical detail, historic context, and literary analysis while focusing on figures ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Henry Highland Garnet. The most compelling sections address the people who aimed to invoke Puritans' passion and moral character, while wrestling with what they knew to be a more complex heritage. In his discussion of Lydia Maria Child, for instance, Gradert traces how her attempts to maneuver her frustrations with the patriarchal limits of her Calvinist upbringing, the reserve of her Unitarian contemporaries, and the pressures of lobbying for abolition while trying to support herself and her husband through her writing led to The Kansas Emigrants. Calling it a "novella best described as half feminist Western and half Puritan errand into the wilderness," he argues that, in this understudied work about New England abolitionists in the midst of Bleeding Kansas, Child "rechannels the Puritan spirit away from New England and into women's heroism as the settlers continue their ancestors' unfinished errand" (64, 66). For James Russell Lowell, abolition offered a way to give his life as a poet meaning, and poetry gave him a way to reimagine Puritan heritage as a "powerful resource for a progressive democracy," but the death of his two nephews in the Civil War caused him to grow [End Page 311] wary of unmitigated zeal, even for a righteous cause (112). In the final chapter, Gradert explores how Black authors such as Garnet invoked both the Mayflower and the slave ship to claim their place in American society. Tracing the Puritan influence through such varied written works, in addition, allows Gradert to bring new insight to well-studied moments in abolitionist historiography, such as the schism in the American Anti-Slavery Society and Emerson's turn towards antislavery. The book is well-written and well-organized, and there is a clear logic to the chapters' groupings, done variously by genre, gender, race, and, in the case of the Beechers, family. Disrupting these silos, however, might have been powerful. Some of Gradert's most interesting observations come through his comparison of how Child and Emerson navigated similar territory, but he puts Child in the chapter with members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and Emerson with male orators, limiting the space for this exploration. However, the chapter on Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, grouped because of their family relationship, leads to insightful comparisons of the approaches of and options for a male minister and a female novelist; they take different routes to arrive at the same end, using Puritan images to espouse a communal vision of religion quite unrecognizable as the Calvinism...