American Abolitionists Research Articles

ANTISLAVERY IMPULSES

The year 2015 marks not only the sesquicentennial of Appomattox but also the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Martin Duberman's anthology The Antislavery Vanguard, a collection of essays that set the agenda for an ever-expanding treatment of antislavery that continues to this day. In assessing these new additions to that literature, I began to think about the arc that historians of American abolitionism have traced in the past half-century, and the ways in which Kytle and McDaniel were inheritors and extenders of that historiographical revolution. Duberman defined his purpose as bringing together the work of historians bent on overthrowing a long-prevailing view of abolitionists as “meddlesome fanatics . . . wrapped in their self-righteous fury, who did so much to bring on a needless war.” He initially imagined a volume that would debate abolitionist virtue and vice but could find no scholars who would uphold the older stereotype. Instead, his contributors explored themes largely sympathetic to the reformers.

Abolitionist Geographies by Martha Schoolman (review)

Reviewed by: Abolitionist Geographies by Martha Schoolman Pia Wiegmink Martha Schoolman. Abolitionist Geographies. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014. 240 pp. $75.00 cloth/ $25.00 paper. In Abolitionist Geographies, Martha Schoolman approaches abolitionist literature through the lens of geography; she draws attention to the multifaceted and often highly ambivalent ways in which spatial confines and geographic knowledge had significant impact upon abolitionist discourses. Her geopolitical approach thus brings to the fore what were central conundrums for abolitionists, such as the questions of white paternalism vis-à-vis black resistance, immediate versus gradual emancipation, accommodationism versus radical abolition, and nonviolent means of moral suasion versus armed rebellion. In her Introduction, which begins with a discussion of “the quintessential North American geographic novel” (1), Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America (1859-62), Schoolman maps the “literary geography” (5) of U. S. abolitionism in a period from the Emancipation of the West Indies (1834) to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (1859). What follows are five densely argued chapters, which focus on different (albeit primarily white) authors and key themes of “literary abolitionism” (1), a term that unfortunately remains rather vague as it is not clear what informed Schoolman’s selection of primary texts, which range from classic abolitionist fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to Emerson’s essay Nature (1836), a text that is seldom discussed in the context of abolition. Chapters one and two focus on white New England intellectuals and the geopolitical context of the British West Indies. Schoolman first examines the emerging abolitionist thought of New England intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing via their “convalescent southern travel” (36) and draws attention to the repeated and highly ambivalent intersection of discourses of illness and abolition. “What if,” Schoolman asks, the “parlors [of northerners] and their stomachs could do without plantation produce, but their lungs could not recover without the plantation climate?” (35). In typical fashion for Abolitionist Geographies, several other aspects are interwoven in this already complex topic of abolitionists’ transatlantic and hemispheric “itineraries of illness in the 1830s” (35): Schoolman reflects, for example, upon New Englanders’ conflicting observations concerning post-emancipation wage labor conditions (in comparison to slavery) and gradual emancipation (in contrast to immediate emancipation). Taken together, these multiple discourses show how the transnational flows of material goods, the corporeal experience of illness (and the travel it necessitates), and competing [End Page 387] economic visions of global labor are inextricably entwined in New England’s abolitionist thought. In the second chapter, “August First and the Practice of Disunion,” Schoolman examines the “strategic superficiality of the August First Celebration” (82) to commemorate Emancipation Day as an event of universal rather than national relevance. She shows how white American abolitionists turned Emancipation Day into a model for a peaceful end to slavery in the U. S., which was politically in sync with Garrison’s doctrine of nonviolence. Furthermore, Schoolman demonstrates how white abolitionists failed to acknowledge important precursors to emancipation in the West Indies, such as the slave revolt in Jamaica in 1832, in order to emphasize white control and deliberately construct a lack of black agency in the process of emancipation. While Schoolman’s line of argument is reasonable, her narrative would have benefited from a more detailed discussion of African American commemorations––and their equally strategic use of this transnational event––as they have been examined by Mitch Kachun (Festivals for Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915, 2003) and Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World, 2007). Chapter three analyzes black cosmopolitanism in William Wells Brown’s first travel narrative Three Years in Europe (1852). Schoolman argues how Brown, during his stay in Europe, gained a black cosmopolitan consciousness that was decidedly different from the typical notion of cosmopolitanism as a movement from the rural new world of slavery to the freedom of the metropolitan cities of the old world. During his attendance at the international peace conference in Paris in 1849, for example, Brown became aware of “the fragile tranquility of the present and the upheavals of the past” (116)––a realization which made him...

FREE-TRADE IDEOLOGY AND TRANSATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM: A HISTORIOGRAPHY

This essay seeks to trace the many—and often conflicting—economic ideological interpretations of the transatlantic abolitionist impulse. In particular, it explores the contested relationship between free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism, and highlights the understudied influence of Victorian free-trade ideology within the American abolitionist movement. By bringing together historiographical controversies from the American and British side, the essay calls into question long-standing conceptions regarding the relationship between free trade and abolitionism, and suggests new avenues for research.

Abolitionists and the Eloquence of Abuse: Revisiting Status and Rhetoric in Social Movements

Current discussions of contentious performances profitably draw upon a revival of theories of culture, emotion, and performance. Yet status theory and status claims-making continue to be neglected in the mix because of their received associations with classical tension theory and unpopular functionalist models of collective behavior. Because most social movement participants are outsiders to the ‘halls of power,’ their dependence upon the rhetoric of status in cultivating moral influence is much more fundamental than previously acknowledged, although this relation is hinted at in Tilly's notion of contentious performances. Efforts to recover status theory navigate between two major mistakes in past theories of collective behavior: the voluntaristic overemphasis of affective manipulation by charismatic leaders, and the deterministic conflation of status with large reified social structures. The concept of reception fields is proposed to refer to the relational, fluid, social–psychological status dynamics between movement leaders and audiences during contentious performances, in which distinction and rhetoric are mutually constitutive. The article situates eloquence or the emotional energy of protest rhetoric in the dramaturgical performance of status dynamics within the immediate reception field. The utility of this approach to status rhetoric is illustrated with respect to American antislavery abolitionism.

United in Love & Violence

United in Love & Violence Marc Jampole (bio) Rootwork Veronica Golos Three: A Taos Press www.3taospress.com 122 Pages; Print, $25.00 Veronica Golos’s Rootwork packs structural elements as densely as the underground root system of a tree that graces its cover and many of its pages. She weaves at least three different organizing principles into her material, starting with the absolutely beautiful graphic design, which is dominated by the cover’s crisp photo of a sculpture of a root in electrical wire, paper, acrylics, and fabric, created by contemporary Cuban artist Jorge Mayet. Each chapter begins with a block of yellowing parchment, as if from an antique book, on which we see the chapter number, the years covered by the chapter, the Mayet root image, and the words of a popular spiritualist. After a blank page, the second printed page of the chapter always contains quotes. To the right of the poems, presented as letters or diary entries of either American abolitionist John Brown or his devoted wife Mary Day Brown, sits a postage-stamp sized image of whoever’s voice it is. One or more poems in every chapter is printed over a shadow image of Mayet’s root. With occasional variation, the book repeats this visually rich and antique-looking design pattern eight times. The second structural layer is the story told in Rootwork’s seven chapters plus coda. The narrative takes a circuitous route, going back in time from Mary Brown mourning her husband’s lynching in 1859 to the early days of their 1833 marriage when he was twice her age, and then forward to the end of Mary’s life. The third level of structure involves the interweaving of the three types of documents that Rootwork comprises, all written by Golos even when attributed to either Brown or his wife: entries from Mary Day Brown’s notebook and letters primarily between the Browns, plus the reconstruction (from someone’s notes) of a speech Mary gave near the end of her life; a “chapbook” of May Day Brown’s poems titled “Water Cure” that stands roughly in the middle of the book; and very modernistic poems that Golos calls “ghost code” poems. Each of these types of poems has its own typeface, and each is written in its own style. The contrast between the aesthetics of these three styles is striking. The letters and notebook entries are prosy and plain-speaking, light on imagery and very heavy on narrative: “Mrs. Frances Harper has agreed to deliver this letter. I trust her completely, as do you. She will help, I believe, in the days to come. Trust also in the Lord”; or “We have the slate and coal to mark the lines & together we copy the words of God.” What makes these poems compelling is the story they tell: the history of their relationship focused on the Browns’ self-appointed mission in life—to root out slavery. In Rootwork, both John and Mary are equally devoted to their spouse, their god, and the abolitionist movement—both with a blazing fervor, but of a grim sort, as if the most tender of loves could not be made to crack a smile. In stark contrast to the plain style of these imaginary historical documents stand the imagistic and open-ended ghost code poems. The ghost code poems unfold in stark images, changing perspectives, unconventional syntax, and a relentless musicality: into the hair of tidesI am still dampwhen I wake from before [End Page 13] deep in thisin-between or blaze:(a whistlecan kill) conjure wish shout putscreech field holler blues(for)king or in froth foam in free domesdress in the skins of sky and horizon divedown The 14 poems of “Water Cure” stand somewhere in between the open-ended modernism of the ghost code poems and the prosaic narrative of the letters and notebook. They speak in a straightforward manner but with the elevated sense of meaning that is the essence of poetry: We namedinto each other, named in orderto press each wordcleanly, our forgetting fleshso fragile. or YesterdayI knelt in dry dirt...

The War against Slavery, Reconsidered and Reframed

The War against Slavery, Reconsidered and Reframed Suzanne Cooper Guasco (bio) Andrew Delbanco et al. The Abolitionist Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. vii + 205 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. W. Caleb McDaniel. The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 344 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $48.00. Scholars have long been interested in abolitionists and the history of the movement to end slavery. Historians have been particularly enamored with the radical immediatism of William Lloyd Garrison and his followers. Most discussions of these topics begin with the 1969 publication of Aileen S. Kraditor’s Means and Ends in American Abolition: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850. In this important work, Kraditor explored the efficacy of the strategies employed by Garrison as well as the nature of the internal divisions over tactics that plagued the movement. She represented Garrison and his fellow abolitionists as polemical but rejected the notion that they were radical fanatics who pursued an unattainable moral and societal perfectionism. Subsequent scholars—James Brewer Stewart, Ronald G. Walters, Henry Meyer, and Robert H. Azbug, to name a few—have expanded upon her conclusions by exploring the origins of the abolitionist mentality and the role abolitionism played in the eventual triumph of emancipation. More recently, historians have shifted their attention to the roles black radicalism and the issues of race played in the movement to end slavery. Historians as varied as Benjamin Quarles, Merton Dillon, James Huston, Paul Goodman, John Stauffer, and Richard S. Newman have demonstrated convincingly that Northern free black activism and slave resistance radicalized white opponents of slavery, which led abolitionists to collaborate with black leaders as they abandoned the gradualist position predominant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and embraced an immediatist approach to ending slavery after 1830. Despite the scope and quality of this scholarship, however, historians continue to debate a wide variety of questions about abolitionism. What role did abolitionists play in the coming of the American Civil War? Was the [End Page 60] Garrisonian movement a fanatical product of a distinctly American reform impulse? How influential (and effective) was this embattled minority? Who among the warriors against slavery can be legitimately called an abolitionist and who deserves the more conservative label of antislavery activist? How inclusive was the movement to end slavery and what was the nature of the abolitionist commitment to racial equality? Andrew Delbanco and W. Caleb McDaniel offer the latest contributions to this scholarly conversation and engage several, though not all, of these questions. In his latest book, The Abolitionist Imagination (2012), Andrew Delbanco seeks to illuminate the abolitionist temperament and, in doing so, asks scholars to reconsider their celebration of a small group of radical idealists whose efforts to eradicate slavery resulted in the most violent and deadly war in American history. He argues that “the sacred rage of abolitionism—its moral urgency and uncompromising fervor, its vision of the world purified and perfected—has been at work in many holy wars since the war against slavery” (pp. 47–48). For him, the abolitionist temperament is “an ahistorical category of human will and sentiment” and nineteenth-century abolitionists were merely the first group among many to identify “a heinous evil” and demand “to eradicate it—not tomorrow, not next year, but now” (p. 23). By understanding abolitionism in this way, argues Delbanco, scholars might reassess their celebration of nineteenth-century radical abolitionists and expand their investigations to include antislavery moderates who questioned the cost of abolition, fearing that the price of enacting it would be too great (p. 54). Today’s scholars, cautions Delbanco, might soberly acknowledge the sacrifice that brought freedom, eagerly celebrate abolitionists for provoking that change, and, in hindsight, say that it was worth the price paid; but they do so at the risk of neglecting the broader story of the war against slavery and the lessons nineteenth-century abolitionism has to offer to all subsequent radical reform efforts. As Delbanco recounts, abolitionists, though small in number, were divided over strategy and often inconsistent and inconstant in their actions. They attracted...

Radical Abolitionism through Self Revelation in American Literature

The major purpose of the article is to shed light on the contribution of literature to the American abolitionist movement .The article shall be an attempt to reveal the major roots of black radicalism as well as the background of their ideological project and radical movement in the American society .In fact, the Americans and since the Revolution, have adopted a set of principles like the necessity of applying justice, freedom, and equality that became later the major ideals of the American society and that made the Americans feel themselves exceptional in founding the true democratic society in which every individual can enjoy freedom, equality ,and justice .The abolitionist movement came out to apply the theory of the “self evident truths” on the African American people. Black writers saw in literature an appropriate tool to foster and argue for radical abolitionism. Self revelation was a window through which the reading public could feel the plight of the African Americans in the USA society.

The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family

The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family

Blackface Abolition and the New Slave Narrative

Since the 1990s, survivors of forced labor have been authoring first-person narratives that consciously and unconsciously reiterate the tropes and conventions of the nineteenth-century American slave narrative. These “new slave narratives” typically conform to the generic tendencies of the traditional slave narratives and serve similar activist purposes. Some of the most popular of the narratives have taken a particular political turn in the post-9/11 context, however, as neoliberal political agendas and anti-Muslim sentiments come to dominate the form and content of many of the African narratives that have been produced. This paper identifies a “blackface abolitionist” trend, in which the first-person testimonies of formerly enslaved Africans is co-opted by some politically motivated white American abolitionists to play a black masquerade, in which they adorn themselves with the suffering of enslaved Africans to thinly veil the self-exonerating and self-defensive crusade politics that motivate their engagement in anti-slavery work.

The David Walker Memorial Project

Launched at the Museum of African American History in Boston, Massachusetts, in September 2012, the David Walker Memorial Project (dwmp) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the life and work of the African American abolitionist David Walker. In addition to hosting symposia and staged readings and organizing marches, the dwmp has built a digital exhibit to educate the public about the work of an “unsung hero.” To that end, this exhibit sketches Walker's upbringing in the South and his early activism in Boston; it analyzes his polemic 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World; and it traces his influence on the abolition movement. Given this solid start, the dwmp will likely fulfill its objective to memorialize Walker as a hero of the African American freedom struggle. It is presumed—perhaps rightfully so—that Walker's activism is a subject that escapes all but the most well-versed U.S. historians. The dwmp argues that Walker deserves a place alongside other more well-known African American activists such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Relying on the latest scholarship from James Horton and Lois Horton, Peter P. Hinks, and Donald Jacobs (among others), this digital exhibit demonstrates how Walker encouraged enslaved and free African Americans and their allies to play a distinctive role in abolishing slavery and eradicating racial prejudice in the United States. While this exhibit considers Walker's impact on abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, there is an equally fascinating, though unexplored, discussion about Walker's friendship with Maria Stewart, an African American abolitionist who was one of the first women to lecture in public on political issues.

What did Africa Mean to Frederick Douglass?

Since the eighteenth century, anti-slavery and antiracist activists of African descent across the Atlantic world have sought to establish a connection with Africa. The great American abolitionist Frederick Douglass resisted those trends. Douglass self-identified as a citizen of the USA and rejected all arguments that African-Americans had any racial, national or spiritual connection with African peoples. This article situates the roots of Douglass' position within his long fight against various schemes for colonization and emigration. It concludes that Douglass rejected those plans not only because he believed they distracted from the struggle against slavery in the USA, but also because he was convinced that Anglo-American civilization provided far greater opportunities for individual and collective betterment than relocation to Africa.

Book Review: The Abolitionist Imagination

Abolitionist Imagination. By Andrew Delbanco. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-674-6444-7. Pp. xi +205. $24.95. Andrew Delbanco's brief volume Abolitionist Imagination offers civil discourse on the topic of abolitionism as applied, not only to the anti-slavery movement of the nineteenth century, but also to his theory that such movements reflect recurrent American phenomenon (3). Turning to literature as his example, Delbanco explores antebellum American examples from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to illustrate that abolitionists, contrary to postwar reactions, were seen largely as radical fringe group by many American writers who chose not to champion the cause in their writings. discourse on this topic takes the form of commentaries written by scholars John Stauffer, Manisha Sinha, Darryl Pinckney, and Wilfred M. McClay. Each critical essay offers reaction to Delbanco's thesis from different perspective. Ultimately, as Daniel Carpenter notes in the foreword, The volume becomes reference work on American abolitionism and its meaning (x). Defining abolitionism as a determined minority set out, in the face of long odds, to rid the world of what it regards as patent and entrenched evil, Delbanco argues that it is a persistent impulse in American life, (3) and that, as part of human nature, have not seen the last of it, and probably never will (23). Noting that authors such as Hawthorne did not side with or against the abolitionist movement, posits that antebellum American literature came to be valued for the case it made for compromise and moderation--for the middle ground that vanished as the nation descended into fratricidal war (39). Citing comments by scholars such as Kenneth Lynn, who in the 1960s identified as the gravest moral problem in the nation's history, Delbanco argues that the American literature canon eventually changed because of the successful campaign of the anti-slavery movement. study of literature of the African American experience, believes, grows from the need to face all aspects of this historical period and to do so by looking at the words of the participants of and its aftermath. He cautions against criticizing authors like Hawthorne for their lack of engagement, however, suggesting that we consider our own level of reaction to the oppression in countries that produce many of the United States' consumer items. What moral stand are we taking? asks. John Stauffer's contribution, Fighting the Devil with His Own Fire, delves more deeply into the outlooks of Hawthorne, Henry James, and Lionel Trilling to demonstrate his disagreement with Delbanco's assertion that the writers, like others, viewed the abolitionists as radical element of society and the issue of in their works. Stating that for Hawthorne slavery was comparatively benign institution (63), Stauffer offers numerous examples of the author's unsympathetic views toward blacks and slavery. Of James, writes: Silence was James' preferred mode for improving race relations. Regarding Trilling, one of the most important cultural critics of the twentieth century, Stauffer argues he remained largely silent about the plight of blacks in America (65). Stauffer offers these impressions to counter Delbanco's idea that American writers sought centrist approach to the question of slavery. Additionally Stauffer explores successes of early abolitionists (1780s-1820s), demonstrating that many abolitionists hoped for gradual dissolution of rather than an immediate end to the institution. Arguing again that Delbanco's portrayal of the group as radical and fringe is inaccurate, points out that America's founders---Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin--sought gradual end to the evil without uprooting the social order or their wealth and domestic comforts (68). Ultimately, Stauffer offers Herman Melville as the nineteenth-century American writer who foresaw the problems created by violent disruption of slavery, provocatively stating that if every American had been required to read Moby Dick when it was published in 1851, the Civil War may have been avoided (79). …

Transatlantic Delusions and Pro-slavery Religion: Isaac Nelson's Evangelical Abolitionist Critique of Revivalism in America and Ulster

This article considers the arguments of one evangelical anti-slavery advocate in order to freshly examine the relationship between abolitionism and religious revivalism. Although it has often been thought that evangelicals were wholly supportive of revivals, the Reverend Isaac Nelson rejected the 1857–58 revival in the United States and the 1859 revival in Ulster partly owing to the link between these movements and pro-slavery religion. Nelson was no insignificant figure in Irish abolitionism, as his earlier efforts to promote emancipation through the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society, and in opposition to compromise in the Free Church of Scotland and at the Evangelical Alliance, received the approbation of various high-profile American abolitionists. Unlike other opponents of revivals, Nelson was not attacking them from a perspective which was heterodox or anti-evangelical. Hence his critique of revivalism is highly significant from both an evangelical and an abolitionist point of view. The article surveys Nelson's assessment of the link between revivalism and pro-slavery religion in America, before considering his specific complaints against the revival which occurred in 1857–58 and its Ulster counterpart the following year.

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom by Marcus Rediker (review)

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom By Marcus Rediker. (New York: Viking, 2012. Pp. 288. Cloth, $27.95.)Reviewed by Graham Russell Gao HodgesStephen Spielberg's 1997 film account of the Amistad Revolt of 1839 begins with gripping scenes of enslaved people digging out with bare fingers the nails holding imprisoning irons. After those visceral images the movie settles into a familiar courtroom drama, leaving the flesh and blood world of the rising slaves behind. The film depended heavily on Howard Jones's Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York, 1987). Jones emphasized the effect of the revolt on abolitionism and American politics and focused on the legal battle over the rebels' status. Now Marcus Rediker applies his ample talents to tell the story of the Amistad Africans themselves within Atlantic culture. Rediker, winner of many prizes for his works on eighteenth-century pirates and on slave ships, is one of the best prose stylists and researchers among contemporary historians, and those skills are on full display in the present book.The Amistad Revolt is well known to historians, though never before have all of the methods of a skilled social historian been put to use. Howard Jones's fine monograph is closest thematically to Rediker's approach. One should also, given Rediker's heavy emphasis on the contemporary creation of historical memory in popular culture, consider Iyunolu Folanyan Osagie's 2000 book on Amistad in historical memory. As Rediker is especially keen to place Amistad as a formative intervention in abolitionism, Jones's argument that the revolt made abolitionism ever more entwined in American politics is most apposite. Moving beyond this argument, Rediker focuses on the rebels themselves and contends that the revolt made abolitionists more accepting of violent means for ending slavery.Rediker begins his saga with a careful account of the African origins of the Amistad rebels. By locating their nationalities, he indicates the importance of the Poro, a secret masculine society devoted to settling local disputes and creating global unity (32). Throughout, Rediker combines direct factual recollection with context about domestic servitude, wars, slave factories, the slave trade, and the Middle Passage to the slave pens of Havana, where traffic in human bondage still persisted decades after the British closed Atlantic slave commerce. In so doing, Rediker firmly aligns with and pushes forward W. E. B. Du Bois's observation in The Souls of Black Folk that rebellion flowed in the blood of AfricanAmerican slaves. Rediker thereby contradicts a long train of scholarship starting with Gerald Mullin's Flight and Rebellion in 1973, through Ira Berlin's 1999 opus, Many Thousands Gone, and implicitly argued as well in 2012, in Stephen Kantrowicz's More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889-that skilled, acculturated enslaved people were more likely to run away and rebel than forcibly imported bond people brought directly from Africa.Following a fine section on the rebels' experiences in Cuban slave society, Rediker details their rising against their sea masters on the Amistad and the ensuing, wandering sail to Long Island in the United States. …

The Bloody Skirt of Settlement: Arthur Vogan and Anti-Slavery in 1890s Australia

This article concerns Arthur Vogan's novel The Black Police, published in 1890. In his book Vogan drew upon an affective global language of suffering that combined appeals to his experience as an eyewitness of the frontier with popular stereotypes drawn from British and American abolitionist precedents. These sources included Uncle Tom's Cabin and popular newspaper commentary on Queensland frontier violence that had circulated earlier in Australia and Britain. The reception of Vogan's novel was mixed: while it reached a wide audience, it failed to prompt official action, and local and British reviewers charged him with sensationalism and ‘embellishment’. Vogan defended his work vehemently, asserting it was based on fact. Reviewers' scepticism stemmed, however, from Vogan's uneasy blend of realist narrative, grounded in eyewitness testimony, and the popular and sensational fictional and visual conventions he deployed. At the end of a period of intense frontier conflict in Queensland over the preceding three decades, Vogan's novel of protest and its ambivalent reception point to the limits of humanitarian influence within an Australian, intercolonial, and ultimately imperial framework.

We are the Revolutionists: German‐Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848. By MischaHoneck. University of Georgia Press. 2011. xiii + 236pp. £21.95.

We are the Revolutionists: German‐Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848. By MischaHoneck. University of Georgia Press. 2011. xiii + 236pp. £21.95.

The African Origins of the Amistad Rebellion, 1839

AbstractThis essay explores the Amistad rebellion of 1839, in which fifty-three Africans seized a slave schooner, sailed it to Long Island, New York, made an alliance with American abolitionists, and won their freedom in a protracted legal battle. Asking how and why the rebels succeeded, it emphasizes the African background and experience, as well as the “fictive kinship” that grew out of many incarcerations, as sources of solidarity that made the uprising possible. The essay concludes by discussing the process of mutiny, suggesting a six-phase model for understanding the dynamics of shipboard revolt, and showing how such events can have powerful historical consequences.

We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848

Book Review| January 01 2013 We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848. By Mischa Honeck. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011. xiii + 260 pp. Photos, map, notes, index, and bibliography. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). Kristen Anderson Kristen Anderson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2013) 32 (2): 112–113. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.2.0112 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kristen Anderson; We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2013; 32 (2): 112–113. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.2.0112 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Slave Suicide, Abolition and the Problem of Resistance

Shifting calculations about the political palatability of representing slave suicide in American abolitionist print culture reveal the extent to which debates about agency, power and consent – and thus about self-destruction – lay at the heart of that new nation's struggle over the future of slavery. Was a slave's suicide an act of principled resistance to tyranny that challenged the hypocrisy of the revolutionary settlement? Or was it a measure of abject victimhood that begged for humanitarian intervention? That representations of black suicide oscillated so dramatically between these opposing interpretive frameworks testifies to deep divides between moderates and militants, and between whites and blacks, as to who had the power to bring slavery to its knees.

“Pardon Me for the Digression”: Robert Forten and James Forten Jr. Address the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society

This study features two speeches by African American abolitionists Robert B. Forten and James Forten Jr., who in the 1830s addressed the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Their orations simultaneously appeal to conventional nineteenth-century, white, upper- and middle-class notions of womanhood while drawing upon arguments that more typically inform male abolitionist rhetoric. In addition, both men emphasize traditional racial differences while seeking to establish links with their listeners that transcend these differences. The development of a powerful collective sense of identity, achieved through the constitutive quality of their arguments, forms the speeches' best opportunity to serve abolition.