Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance (review)

Abstract

Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and American Renaissance. By Larry J. Reynolds. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Pp. 256. Paper, $24.95.)Reviewed by Andre M. FlecheLarry J. Reynolds, Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University, has produced a body of exciting interdisciplinary and globally oriented work on intellectual history of mid nineteenth century. His first book, European Revolutions and American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 1988), was among earliest studies to examine impact that European of 1848 had on American intellectuals. In his newest volume, Righteous Violence, Reynolds develops themes related to his earlier work, tracing ways in which seven writers of American Renaissance grappled with moral and ethical problems posed by many instances of politically motivated violence that troubled world of mid-1800s. In seven loosely connected essays, some versions of which previously appeared elsewhere, Reynolds explores ways in which some of America's best-known writers struggled to find answers to one important question: Under what circumstances is it morally right to kill another human being? (1). Reynolds argues that each author resolved problem in different ways, but that all wrestled with it, thereby imparting much of moral urgency to literary movement that was subsequently termed the American Renaissance.Reynolds begins his study with observation that violence permeated nineteenth century (1). Much of conflict, he argues, was driven by growing tension between desire for human liberty and existence of human oppression and slavery. The American Revolution, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, of 1848, American Civil War, and struggles of early labor movement, Reynolds contends, all suggested to contemporaries that violence might be employed in a righteous struggle for human freedom. According to Reynolds, many of authors he studied dwelt especially on figure of John Brown as they responded to ethical dilemmas inherent in current events. For some writers, figures like Brown, and rebellions, revolts, riots, insurrections, and revolutions they fomented, represented principled heroism, while other authors remained more ambivalent about those who would kill so that good might be done (x).Reynolds, in his first and most provocative chapter, argues that Margaret Fuller's dispatches from Italy during of 1848 and 1849 may have inspired a generation of abolitionists to abandon their pacifist principles and embrace violence in name of freedom. Fuller strongly supported struggle of Italian revolutionaries to establish a republic in Rome, and, in her dispatches, depicted such insurrectionists as Giuseppe Garibaldi as heroic and romantic men-of-action. She even went so far as to countenance brutal assassination by stabbing of prominent reactionary, Count Pellegrino Rossi. Fuller's writings, Reynolds contends, had a strong impact on such militant abolitionists as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Franklin Sanborn. In a later chapter, Reynolds demonstrates that Fuller's work may also have inspired Louisa May Alcott, whose novel Moods (1865) prominently featured a character who left America to fight alongside Garibaldi in Rome.The other authors in Reynolds's study did not embrace violence so quickly or easily. For Frederick Douglass, Reynolds argues in his second chapter, decision to abandon pacifism proved difficult. Douglass understood human relationships slavery could engender, but also experienced brutal repression institution entailed. Reynolds demonstrates, through a close reading of Douglass's work, how famous abolitionist gradually abandoned his pacifist principles over course of 1840s and 1850s, finally concluding in his story The Heroic Slave (1853) that slave revolt, like political revolution, could be justified in name of human freedom. …