Subversives: antislavery community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865

Abstract

Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865. By Stanley Harrold. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 280. Illustrations, abbreviations. Cloth, $69.95; paper, $24.95.)Until recently, scholars of the abolitionist movement have focused on two areas of the early republic: The broad Burned-over District that stretched from Boston to Buffalo and the Ohio world of the Lane Rebels. Of late, historians like Graham Russell Hodges, Gary Nash, and Richard Newman-writers more interested in black activism than in white evangelical reform movements-have turned their attention to New York and Philadelphia. In this elegantly written account, Stanley Harrold carries this story down to the shores of the Chesapeake. Building on his earlier studies of Gamaliel Bailey and radical activity in the border South (Gamaliel Bailey and Anti-Slavery Union [1986], The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861 [1995]), Harrold here painstakingly reconstructs the biracial antislavery of Washington City in the antebellum era. Eschewing a traditional discussion of political elites who spoke against slavery in the halls of Congress, Harrold instead chronicles the men and women-most obscure even in their own day-who bought and freed slaves, educated black children, pursued court action, and even risked their lives to help bondpeople escape the city.Although specialists in the abolitionist crusade typically investigate the religious antecedents of the movement, Harrold pays greater notice to Chesapeake schools. By cooperating in black education, he suggests, radicals established a framework for the future (27). Believing literacy and a marketable skill to be the basis for subsequent black improvement, white and black abolitionists bravely conducted elementary schools in Georgetown and Washington. Education not only gave the lie to prevailing theories of black intellectual inferiority; it created a generation of activists who used their new skills to publicize the cruelty of slavery in a city where unwaged labor was generally thought to be mild in nature.Following the lead of sociologist Joseph Gusfield, Harrold defines the term community less in terms of region than in its relational sense. Although Subversives retains a tight focus on the Washington area, the activists who people its story came and went over the decades. What held them together, despite the obvious dissimilarities of race and income, was their empathy and altruism. Most of all, what linked these activists was what differentiated them from the proslavery majority in the region. But if schools and churches gave rise to the antislavery movement, the antislavery was born in the parlors of white abolitionists. Residents of the capital were accustomed to finding African Americans in elegant homes, but only as domestics. When Congressman Joshua Giddings invited blacks, (slave and free) into his boarding house as guests and social equals, it was that simple act of courtesy, fully as much as the subject matter of his counsel, that marked him as a radical. Black strangers seeking help, advice, and protection turned to powerful activists like the Ohio Whig, and in the process, elite whites and working-class blacks forged bonds of interracial trust that aided in the process of slaves buying their freedom or fleeing north toward Canada.Because these activists were ready to employ any means to liberate even a few slaves-from the purse to the courtroom to the rifle-Washington abolitionists were rarely followers of William Lloyd Garrison. …