The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race

Abstract

The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. By John Stauffer. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 367. Illustrations. Cloth, $29.95.) Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. By Patrick Rael. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 421. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $19.95.) The proof that many roads lead to the past lies in reading these two books one after the other. Both concern the construction of race in the early nineteenth century, but their approaches could not be more different. Both write from postmodern perspectives, but while John Stauffer impressionistically braids the lives of four abolitionists, two white and two black, to understand their special brand of friendship in a racist world, Patrick Rael offers a carefully argued reinterpretation of the entirety of elite protest thought before the Civil War. Both reach pessimistic conclusions. Race may be a constructed concept, but it is woefully difficult to escape its bonds. The black hearts in Stauffer's title refers to the idea, enunciated by James McCune Smith, the Edinburgh educated African-American physician, that whites must shed their sense of whiteness as a form of superiority and share a heart for racial equality to be achieved. According to Stauffer, Smith shared this sort of heart-to-heart friendship, at least for a time, with Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown. Stauffer explores what these men had in common to be able to overcome the barriers of race, and arrives at the understanding that it was a romantic faith in perfectibility: the belief that neither race nor sex nor character was immutable or could stand in the way of perfect oneness. Hoping for perfection, these friends endorsed bible as a strategy to spread their sense of unity and human possibility. But while John Brown found in such politics a justification for a violent assault on slavery, Gerrit Smith ultimately quailed at making violence the route to spiritual union. His breakdown after John Brown's Raid was no act. He came to doubt himself, not only as a politician and do-gooder but even as a father. As he drifted away from his former friends, their shared framework for achieving common racial understanding collapsed. Like his subjects, Stauffer understands the importance of the heart. His focus on life stories involves readers emotionally in the dilemma of race. The two Smiths in particular, less familiar to non-specialists, become flesh and blood. Gerrit Smith is the lynchpin of the study. His papers are a key biographical source for all four. Through his extraordinary philanthropy, he acted like a modern foundation, granting money to worthy projects suggested by his correspondents, including the other men in this study. Stauffer intrigues the reader by writing of these men jointly and topically. He examines how they presented themselves to the public in photographs, how they spent their childhoods, how they weathered the Panic of 1837, what they thought of politics, of Indians, of women, and of achieving independence from a still-tainted society. This is a work that can appeal to an audience broader than historians while at the same time adding scholarly insights on romantic perfectionism and illuminating the considerable but less known activities of the two Smiths. …