American Anti-Slavery Society Research Articles

Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis by Brian C. Neumann

Reviewed by: Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis by Brian C. Neumann James Hill “Trae” Welborn III Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis. By Brian C. Neumann. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 216. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7690-0.) In Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis, historian Brian C. Neumann achieves his overarching purposes—to reframe the nullification crisis by “emphasizing the partisan conflict within South Carolina” and to restore “the state’s Union Party to the center of the story, providing insight into the hopes, anxieties, and convictions of Jacksonian-era southern Unionists” (p. 4). Neumann argues that these Unionists “viewed the Union as a fragile experiment in self-government—the last hope of liberty in a world dominated by despotism” (p. 4). This focus enables Neumann to recast larger historiographical perspectives on the coming of the Civil War, the ideological force of Unionism in antebellum America, how an idealized southern manhood shaped these dynamics, and the broader transnational context in which these ideological contests transpired. Neumann’s analysis proceeds chronologically from the “rise of radicalism” in South Carolina between 1822 and 1828 (chapter 1), through the “process of political realignment” that followed between 1828 and 1830 (chapter 2), to the proliferation of “partisanship and political violence” between 1830 and 1832 (chapter 3). The next three chapters chart the convoluted course by which radicalism transformed South Carolina’s political culture, turning the state toward proslavery sectionalism and disunion, beginning with the “nullification winter” of 1832–1833 (chapter 4) and continuing through “the test oath controversy” of 1833–1835 (chapter 5) before terminating in the consensus forged around “the politics of slavery” in 1835–1836 (chapter 6). Throughout Neumann asserts that such reframing focuses less on why the American Union collapsed beneath the strains of slavery and sectionalism and more on how it persisted through these crises as long as it did. This analysis extends perspectives previously forwarded most notably by Elizabeth R. Varon. [End Page 353] Though Neumann readily acknowledges that nullification exposed the fault lines of the Union and Unionism, he also expands on the work of Gary W. Gallagher, especially in arguing that the crisis exhibited the sustained commitment to the Union’s promise and perpetuity, even providing “a lexicon of Unionism for all future crises” (p. 7). A tension between what Neumann terms “martial manhood” and “moderate manhood” inflected both the partisan disputes between nullifiers and Unionists and dissension among Unionists. He shows that as they fought against nullification and disunion, some Unionists defended the Union as the political embodiment of “moderate manhood,” while others adopted the more aggressive “martial manhood” of the nullifiers, albeit to defend the Union rather than destroy it (pp. 7–8). Neumann’s analysis of manhood expands most directly on the gendered analyses of historians Amy S. Greenberg, Stephanie McCurry, and James Brewer Stewart. And alongside scholars of Civil War–era transnationalism such as Edward B. Rugemer, Timothy M. Roberts, Adam I. P. Smith, Ann L. Tucker, and Niels Eichorn, Neumann emphasizes how these events unfolded “against the backdrop of global history,” making frequent and pointed references to the earlier French and Haitian Revolutions as well as “a wave of liberal revolutions” in the 1830s that swept “France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and Poland,” which lent “the crisis in South Carolina . . . [a] global significance” in the minds of its combatants (p. 8). Neumann centers the dissenting arguments of Unionists against the growing tide of radical nullifiers bent on capturing the state’s political system and wielding it toward increasingly defiant ends. Neumann rightly emphasizes that proslavery convictions and antislavery fears permeated these processes among both Unionists and nullifiers throughout. He shows that these factions only reached a formidable and, for Unionists, insurmountable consensus beginning in 1835, when South Carolinians tempered their partisanship in response to the American Anti-Slavery Society’s direct mail and petition campaigns. Neumann succinctly summarizes this trend toward radical proslavery consensus in South Carolina by highlighting that though “some state leaders worked to harness federal power to preserve and expand slavery’s reach” during...

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert

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...

Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America by Teresa A. Goddu

Reviewed by: Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum Americaby Teresa A. Goddu Matthew Fox-Amato (bio) Antislavery, Slavery, Abolition, Media, American Anti-Slavery Society, Print culture, Material culture, Visual culture Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America. By Teresa A. Goddu. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 344. Cloth, $55.00.) The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), for Teresa A. Goddu, was more than an influential organization in the 1830s: It was also a cultural machine. The scale and diversity of the AASS's cultural production back this point. Established in 1833, the AASS had reached an estimated circulation of 725,000 copies of its publications per year by the end of the decade. Its many publications included monthly periodicals such as Human Rightsand The Emancipator, the yearly American Anti-Slavery Almanac, and the widely read American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses(1839). It published images such as the broadside Slave Market of America(1836) and organized well-attended fairs in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia, where attendees could buy all kinds of consumer goods to support the cause. In Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America, Goddu asks how AASS representations mobilized opposition to slavery while shaping the identities of the abolitionists who consumed them. One of the many virtues of Selling Antislaveryis how it treats abolitionist [End Page 154]literary texts as one of many cultural forms produced by the movement. After a chapter on the publishing strategies and distribution networks of the AASS, Goddu examines its representations in three sections: print culture (almanacs and slave narratives); material culture (consumer goods at fairs and the fairs as symbolic sites); and visual culture (images in publications and prints). A concluding chapter explores how Black artists and writers not affiliated with the AASS appropriated and contested its aesthetics. Blending business history with wide-ranging cultural analysis, Selling Antislaveryis a compelling contribution to our view of abolitionist media. The book joins a growing body of scholarship stressing the importance of visual and material culture to antebellum activists fighting for abolition and racial justice. Work over the last decade includes Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade(Chicago, 2011); Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity(Durham, NC, 2012); Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery(Philadelphia, 2013); John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American(New York, 2015); Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance(Chicago, 2015); and Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century(Chapel Hill, NC, 2020). Though not limited to abolitionism, these and other works have shown how abolitionists were keen to use images and ephemera to denounce slavery, define their public personas, and forge political bonds. Selling Antislaveryunderscores these insights while deepening our understanding of how, precisely, abolitionists were able to blanket the nation with representations in the 1830s. This was possible, for Goddu, because the AASS employed "innovative organizational structures, new technologies of reproduction and publicity, and systematized distribution" (10). The organization's top-down management structure, which started with the executive committee in New York, catalyzed expansion. The New York office took the lead in strategizing fundraising, planning the production of texts, and training paid lecturers. The AASS also embraced new media technologies, such as the steam press. Once created, AASS texts circulated across the North, to Europe, and even into the slave [End Page 155]South, as in the case of the 1835 postal campaign. Goddu describes the personnel who enabled such distribution and the actual places where people encountered media, including the many reading rooms and bookstores housed in offices of local societies. Grounded in extensive research in newspapers, personal papers, and the records of the AASS executive committee, Selling Antislaveryoffers an invaluable resource for those interested in how the AASS produced and circulated abolitionist texts with great variety, over a vast geography, in...

Group Presence, Population, and Interest Group Theory: A Case Study of the American Anti‐Slavery Society

ObjectiveThis study seeks to learn about the development of large, federated voluntary associations in the antebellum era by combining insights from historical work and neopluralist interest group theory. The American Anti‐Slavery Society (AASS) is the case study.MethodsSummary statistics and logistic regression models are used to investigate what variables predict the presence of an AASS local group in a town.ResultsTotal population of a town is the key predictor of AASS group presence across states, though the percentage of people employed in learned professions and the number of primary common schools per capita are also important in select states.ConclusionPopulation itself was the modernizing force behind group formation in the antebellum era, creating contexts conducive to the mobilization of interests.

Between archival absence and information abundance: Reconstructing Sallie Holley's abolitionist rhetoric through digital surrogates and metadata

ABSTRACTAbolitionist Sallie Holley (1818–1893) lectured widely as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, but she is understudied in rhetoric because her speech transcripts are not extant in existing archives. This essay argues that, even where faced with such archival absences, rhetorical scholars may reconstruct a speaker's career through compilation and analysis of digital surrogates and metadata. In Holley's case, these digital methods are revealing of the map and timeline of her career, patterns in her lectures, and the gendered significance of her public speaking. Similar methods may serve research focused not only on public address by nineteenth-century women like Holley, but on a range of rhetorical practices marked by those archival absences especially common to rhetors who are marginalized by gender, sexuality, race, class, nation, and/or ability.

Abandoned Tracks: The Underground Railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania

Abandoned Tracks: The Underground Railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania

Radical Hospitality and Political Intimacy in Grahamite Boardinghouses, 1830–1850

Radical Hospitality and Political Intimacy in Grahamite Boardinghouses, 1830–1850 April Haynes (bio) After enduring three days of crowded steamboats, segregated cars, and rutted roads, three hundred travel-weary abolitionists filed slowly toward their appointed meeting place in May of 1840 only to meet a menacing crowd. Residents of New York City's fourth ward lined Franklin Street to jeer the unwelcome arrivals. Familiar with such episodes, the antislavery delegation from New England moved with practiced calm toward St. John's Hotel. Urban boardinghouses overflowed with reformers during each anniversary week in the 1830s and 1840s, inundating the scarce lodging spaces otherwise accessible to abolitionists. Added to these usual pressures, the Garrisonian contingent also anticipated an exceptionally ugly battle among fellow abolitionists at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The cresting debate over women's full membership in antislavery organizations had attracted, according to one observer, "far greater numbers" of activists than had attended prior conventions.1 The Franklin Street crowd had been summoned by a white man who [End Page 397] claimed to have witnessed an instance of interracial flirting in the street near the hotel. But a domestic threat soon overshadowed the sexual one. The crowd roared at the sight of "white, black and mulatto, men and women, married and single" carrying "trunks, cloaks, umbrellas, band-boxes, carpet bags, smelling bottles, bedding and other necessary articles" for what appeared to be the start of housekeeping together. Reporters on the scene noted the "cart loads of beds, kitchen utensils, provisions cooked and raw" that the abolitionists carried with them. They watched as the first arrivals "took possession" of the hotel's kitchen to cook a communal meal. A group of teenage girls from the Plymouth Juvenile Antislavery Society realized that the hotel would not have beds for everyone and began hanging up their shawls to portion its ballroom into makeshift sleeping quarters. In the street, "light-colored fathers" ushered their "precious family" indoors. As abolitionists "tumbled in the Hall, with luggage, bed and bedding," men in the crowd bellowed that it would just be a matter of time until they "all lay, like pigs, amalgamated together." A few of them accosted the hotel's proprietor and threatened to burn his building to the ground. He admitted that Arthur Tappan had reserved the hotel for a large group of "religious" travelers but denied admitting this "mixed multitude of commingling colors, tongues and notions of propriety" into his large, elegant hotel. Escorted by street toughs, the hotelier "downed the rough-board table of his early customers, tumbled it and their mass of trumpery into the street, and then compelled the amalgamators to follow their luggage."2 Where could this enormous group of abolitionists find lodging on a moment's notice? And even if the delegation broke into smaller parties, where would African Americans be welcome? Urban entrepreneurs and municipal authorities had built the exclusion of black lodgers into the first national network of hotels. Those who allowed black guests to stay among their predominantly white clientele risked legal suppression as well as extralegal violence. Their businesses could be closed by court order, a policy that survived until the mid-twentieth century. The problem of navigating hostile spaces was nothing new to African Americans in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly when it came to lodging, which was a necessity during journeys that took days or weeks. As Elizabeth Pryor [End Page 398] has recently shown, black mobility was heavily constrained by exclusion, segregation, and harassment. These actions profoundly limited black freedom and citizenship. Unrestricted mobility theoretically separated free people from slaves and bound servants. As freedom of movement increasingly defined citizenship in an expanding nation, "colored travelers" undermined the association in many white minds between blackness and servility. In this context, white Americans fortified their monopoly on travel accommodations and black activists fought campaign after campaign for the right to move freely. In practical terms, the black abolitionists ousted from St. John's Hotel would ordinarily have turned to hospitable friends or black-owned boardinghouses. African American boardinghouse-keepers such as Amelia Seaman advertised directly to black abolitionists, but these resources stretched thin during mass political gatherings. One attendee...

Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest by Stacey M. Robertson

Reviewed by: Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest by Stacey M. Robertson Lowell J. Soike Stacey M. Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 320 pp. $39.95. During the 1830s and 1840s antislavery feeling, though years in the making, was beginning to take hold in the Old Northwest states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Slavery’s antagonists, once operating in a relatively quiet and unorganized state, were now coalescing. And as northern and southern attitudes diverged, so too did their moral compass. This all accompanied the rising southern economy where, taking advantage of the cotton gin’s development and cheap available tracts of land, ambitious southerners found no faster way to fortune than using slave labor to set up a cotton plantation. Soon, however, despite enjoying high demand for their competitive cotton in the textile mills of New England and Great Britain, slaveholders saw that adding thousands more slaves to their expanding operations was fostering sharp negative reactions and posing danger to their national political and economic power. By 1833 the newly founded American Anti-Slavery Society was busy decrying the spreading slave-based economy and calling for immediate emancipation. Before long, American slaveholders saw antislavery influences spreading through numerous antislavery organizations being formed in Ohio and other states. And, because slavery’s wrongs had a strong moral dimension that touched female as well as male social roles, women began taking an active part in the organized opposition. It was here among abolitionists that [End Page 165] women found opportunities beyond the limits of their traditional home and family duties to enter the public arena. In Hearts Beating for Liberty Stacey M. Robertson recounts the lives and pathways taken by women joining the antislavery struggle in the Old Northwest. Focused to a large extent on carefully documenting Ohio developments, the author brings to light the numerous contributions of these dedicated western women and their leaders to the cause. Her intent: to show that shifting the focus from East to the West “forces a reconsideration of antislavery history” to correct the bias of eastern scholarship. Here in the Old Northwest, “a region with a complicated history of slavery and racism, abolitionists working at the grassroots level created a distinct approach characterized by cooperation and flexibility” in building their movement (2). Her excellent introduction challenges the view that western abolition was an eastern import and points out that “Racism and the Black Laws” of the Old Northwest along with its diverse population “created an environment that demanded a pragmatic abolitionism.” This sets the stage for what follows in seven chapters, organized by topic and in a generally chronological fashion. The opening chapter describes overall features of antislavery organization in Ohio, indicating how, unlike in the East, county and statewide groups predominated— and how the female antislavery societies would take on regional issues with national influence, cooperate with men and sister societies in petition campaigns to the mutual benefit of abolitionism, and involve themselves in African American education efforts. Chapter 2 turns to abolitionist women and the Liberty Party, where western women found that through quiet involvement, “the ‘feminine’ area of morality overlapped with the ‘masculine’ political domain in ways that made them more knowledgeable, politically skilled, and accepted.” Chapter 3 takes up their involvement in the Free Produce movement in hopes that slavery might be made unprofitable by citizens “refusing to purchase or use any products made by slaves.” Chapter 4 details how western women pressed their radical agenda through organizing sewing societies, participating at antislavery fairs and conferences to awaken public sentiment. Chapter 5 focuses in on women public speakers such as Betsey Mix Cowles, Lizzie Hitchcock, and Josephine Griffing, who discussed local issues by aiming to attract supporters less by using hardline methods than more effective cooperative approaches. Chapter 6 [End Page 166] on abolitionists and fugitive slaves shows that western women, despite the scoldings of eastern Garrisonians to stop “wasting time and energy” on the futile task of aiding escapees, nonetheless pressed on, finding “their work with fugitives as deeply fulfilling and sometimes life changing.” A final chapter looks to...

Women in the World of Frederick Douglass by Leigh Fought

Reviewed by: Women in the World of Frederick Douglass by Leigh Fought Carol Faulkner (bio) Women in the World of Frederick Douglass. By Leigh Fought. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 401. Cloth, $29.95.) In this original and engaging interpretation of the life of Frederick Douglass, Leigh Fought argues that black and white women were essential to his career as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. But what did women want from Frederick Douglass? They wanted a husband, father, friend, or cause, competing roles that Douglass did not fulfill to anyone's satisfaction. In her intricate analysis of his relationships with different women, Fought illuminates the fundamental tensions between Douglass's private and public worlds, between his African American family and the white female abolitionists who encouraged his activism. In doing so, she also challenges the racial and class assumptions that have informed previous interpretations of Douglass's intimate and interracial relationships. The most important woman in Douglass's life was Anna Murray, a free woman whom he met in Baltimore when he was still enslaved. Their marriage lasted for forty-four years, yet scholars have struggled to understand Anna's continued illiteracy, and they have relied on critical outsiders for comments on her housekeeping skills as well as her unfriendliness, ignorance, and dark coloring. Behind these earlier analyses of the Douglass [End Page 543] marriage was the implication of Frederick's dissatisfaction or unhappiness. Instead, Fought shows that the domesticity of Anna Douglass was a deliberate strategy to counter racism. She saw her role as wife, mother, and homemaker as a privilege and a necessity. In contrast to white assumptions of inferiority or dysfunction, the Douglasses proved they could create an enduring family. Their shared project was not easy. Neither Anna nor Frederick predicted his success as a writer and speaker, which took him away from Anna and their children and moved his family from Massachusetts to New York to Washington, D.C. His career also brought educated, middle-class white women into their lives, destabilizing Anna's authority in her own home. Though she acknowledges Frederick Douglass's charisma, Fought believes that historians have been too quick to accept rumors of his infidelity with white women such as Julia Griffiths, a British abolitionist, and Ottilie Assing, a German journalist. Both women sought Douglass's friendship, supported his public career, and lived in his home for extended periods of time. While he appreciated their companionship and professional assistance, Anna Douglass viewed them as intruders who monopolized her husband. She also believed their presence attracted unwanted attention to his family life. Some white abolitionists, who worried that Frederick Douglass was garnering financial support from British abolitionists that rightfully belonged to the American Anti-Slavery Society, called Julia Griffiths a "jezebel" to undermine her alliance with Douglass (96). In addition, rather than the reciprocal intimacy portrayed in Maria Diedrich's Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (1999), Fought argues that Assing's emotional attachment to Douglass reveals her own dependence on their friendship. As products of a famous and model African American family, Douglass's children came under special scrutiny. Rosetta, his oldest child, was caught between the domestic sphere of her mother and the activist sphere of her father. Her parents prioritized and politicized her education, sending her to Albany to be educated by abolitionist sisters Lydia and Abigail Mott when Rochester schools proved unwelcoming. For a time, Rosetta worked as a teacher, living with black families in Philadelphia and Salem, New Jersey, but she believed her every move and action came under judgment. Rather than pursue the public career of her father, she chose to create her own family by marrying a former slave named Nathan Sprague. Sprague struggled to find steady work, and Frederick Douglass was critical of his inability to support Rosetta and their children. Rosetta did not abandon her husband and worked to support the family, at times taking in sewing or working for her father in the Recorder of Deeds office. When Douglass [End Page 544] remarried, she was critical, viewing this act as a betrayal of her mother and other African American women. After the Civil War, women became...

The Lives of Frederick Douglass

The Lives of Frederick Douglass

From Pressure Group to Political Party: The Case of the American Anti‐Slavery Society and the Liberty Party*

ObjectiveThis study evaluates how the leaders in the American Anti‐Slavery Society (AASS) either aided or hindered the formation of the Liberty Party, thus building on Bawn et al.’s (2012) theory of political party formation.MethodsRegression models are used to study how the presence of AASS organizations affected Liberty Party voting in the early 1840s.ResultsThe findings show that AASS organizations had little to no effect on Liberty voting in New England, where AASS leadership was opposed to the idea of a third party, but that a stronger AASS group presence helped the Liberty Party form outside New England, where leaders were more supportive of an anti‐slavery third party.ConclusionInterest groups do matter for the formation of political parties, but this is dependent on the support provided by, or the opposition put up by, group leaders.

Patriotism & Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation by Jonathan J. Den Hartog

Reviewed by: Patriotism & Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation by Jonathan J. Den Hartog Amanda Porterfield Patriotism & Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation. By Jonathan J. Den Hartog. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2015. Pp. xiv, 262. $39.50. ISBN 978-0-8139-3641-3.) In this year of political turmoil, religious fear, and major challenges to federal institutions and what used to be touted as American values, Jonathan Den Hartog's 2015 book merits careful study. Federalists played a large role in establishing the norms and institutions that defined politics and religion in the early United States and in shaping forms of social organization that persist to this day. Federalists also played a decisive role in establishing a culture of religo-political factionalism that even now thrives with a vengeance. Den Hartog's main thesis is that Federalism passed through three phases—Republican, Combative, and Voluntarist. John Jay represents the Republican phase. As a devout Episcopalian, second Governor of New York, and first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Jay placed self-governing institutions under the aegis of divine authority and viewed co-operation between religious and political institutions as central to God's providential design for America. Representing the Combative stage of Federalist history, Massachusetts Governor Caleb Strong and New England Congregational ministers Timothy Dwight and Jedidiah Morse attacked skepticism of biblical revelation as a threat to the American republic and its providential role in world history. These men railed against the immorality, anarchism, and infidelity they ascribed to French Jacobins, and to Thomas Jefferson and his proto-Democratic followers. As the party of Jefferson gained strength and the Federalist party declined, the next generation of Federalists built voluntary organizations to recoup their losses and promote faith in republican order and providential design. Representing this Voluntarist phase of Federalist history, New Jersey Presbyterian Elias Boudinot [End Page 613] retired from government office to serve evangelical organization, and John Jay's sons Peter and William devoted much of their lives to the American Bible Society, the American Anti-Slavery Society, and other voluntary organizations. The spirit of Federalism lived on through these evangelicals and their national organizations after the political party's demise. Two troublesome groups inside the Federalist camp contributed to that demise. On one flank, Unitarian Federalists rejected the Trinitarian theology espoused by Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Calvinist Congregationalists, and balked at religious intolerance, supernaturalism, and demands for conversion. On the other flank, Southern Federalists embraced the institution of slavery and resented the idea that it was immoral and unchristian, as many Northern Federalists believed. Men like the younger Jays freed Federalism from the Unitarians and slave owners who complicated it. Den Hartog's argument provides a nice complement to that of Nathan Hatch's influential book written three decades ago, The Democratization of American Christianity, which placed the rise of evangelicalism in the early United States at the center of American cultural history. While Hatch focused on the transformation of democratic politics into evangelical populism, Den Hartog focuses on the transformation of Federalist republicanism into evangelical organizations. Taken together, they make a strong case for interpreting American evangelicalism as a political as well as religious movement. Though Den Hartog's voice is not Combative, he does tell a partisan story. Readers of this journal might be surprised by his claim on page 202, that "Federalists had a strong hand in formulating how traditional Christianity would shape the new nation." Den Hartog is not referring to Catholicism here, but to a particular American version of Reformed Protestantism headquartered in Connecticut, elevated to "traditional" status by its evangelical proponents in the early nineteenth century. Passing up opportunities to engage critically the Federalists he admires, Den Hartog never scrutinizes the common-sense realism ubiquitous among them, or the grounding of morality in supernaturalism that some of them insisted upon. Den Hartog does not explain exactly what he means by "traditional Christianity," leaving this reader wishing he had made the effort to explain why some Federalists thought republican virtue impossible without it. Amanda Porterfield Florida State University Copyright © 2017 The Catholic University of America Press

The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha

Reviewed by: The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha Elizabeth R. Varon (bio) The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. By Manisha Sinha. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. 768. Cloth, $37.50.) Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause is a tour de force: a timely analytical synthesis of modern scholarship on abolitionism, full of bracing insights [End Page 130] and correctives. The nearly six hundred pages of detailed text provide a chronological overview of the antislavery struggle, with the opening section of the book covering the movement’s eighteenth-century “first wave” and early republic transition period, and the bulk of the book analyzing antebellum “second wave” immediatism. Sinha’s focus is on the centrality of African Americans to the movement, and particularly on their ideas: methodologically, this is an intellectual history at heart, a lucid genealogy of abolitionist thought. Sinha is careful at every turn both to provide state-of-the-art portraits of familiar thinkers such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and to bring less well known figures, such as William Watkins, James Pennington, and Sarah Parker Remond, to the fore. She shows that such activists deserve credit for establishing and sustaining a black protest tradition that was the foundation of what scholars have called, misleadingly, “Garrisonian” immediatism. Watkins, a leading Baltimore reformer, offered up a pioneering critique of African colonization that William Lloyd Garrison reprised. James W. C. Pennington of Brooklyn formulated the “covenant with death and agreement with hell” critique of the Constitution that Garrison would echo. Remond, an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, worked to internationalize the antislavery movement through an 1858 lecture tour in Britain attended by thousands of listeners. These and many other reformers, in speeches, petitions, resolutions, poems, novels, editorials, and autobiographies, “developed a concerted intellectual response to American racism” (311). Sinha’s book is unabashedly revisionist, as she frequently takes aim at what she characterizes as the conventional wisdom among historians. To those who attribute the “first emancipation” in the North to a waning economic interest in slavery, Sinha responds that black activism, exemplified by the freedom suits of men and women determined to use the legal system as an instrument of liberation, was the true driving force behind slavery’s demise in the North. To those who argue that the antislavery movement entered a doldrums in the early nineteenth century, Sinha responds that organizations such as the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race—which combated kidnapping, promoted black education, and tracked the progress of global antislavery—bridged the gap between first-wave and second-wave abolitionism. To those who argue that abolitionists were bourgeois lackeys of the emerging capitalist order, Sinha responds that the movement’s rank and file was drawn from the laboring classes, not the comfortable middle class; that abolitionism allied itself with workers’ causes such as the ten-hour-day movement, and with socialist communitarian experiments; and that abolitionists emphasized the capitalist nature [End Page 131] of slavery and the collusion of slaveholding and mercantilist elites. Most important, rather than emphasizing abolitionism’s role in inspiring slave resistance and rebellion, as recent scholarship has done, Sinha reverses the equation: slave resistance and rebellion, she argues persuasively, inspired abolitionist activism. In their acts of rebellion, on land and on sea, and in their waves of flight through elaborate networks reaching into Canada, slaves demonstrated not only an “elemental” yearning for liberty but also a “cosmopolitan political sophistication” and knowledge of the “international geopolitics of slavery and freedom” (412). Rather than sharply contrasting the movement’s phases, Sinha emphasizes continuity. To recognize the centrality of African Americans to the antislavery movement, she shows, is to recognize that abolitionism was at every turn radical: black abolitionists demanded freedom “not simply as an act of mercy or benevolence but as acts of justice and retribution” (144). Sinha chronicles the divisions within the movement (over issues such as emigration) and traces the emergence of free-soil political parties. In her account of the fugitive slave controversies of the 1850s and of John Brown’s raid, she demonstrates how the...

Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Eric Foner (review)

Reviewed by: Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Eric Foner Matthew Salafia (bio) Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. By Eric Foner. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. Pp. 320. Cloth, $26.95.) After languishing for years following Larry Gara’s critical denunciation, the Underground Railroad has received a bit more scholarly attention in [End Page 583] recent years. Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad has made it official: the Underground Railroad is safe to study again. Foner successfully elides the mythology surrounding the Underground Railroad through careful contextualization. Although Foner claims that the book is “a study of fugitive slaves and the underground railroad in New York City,” it is much more (7). Rather than an elaborate system filled with codes, hidden tunnels, and secret messages, Foner’s Underground Railroad is an “interlocking series of local networks, each of whose fortunes rose and fell over time, but which together helped a substantial number of fugitives reach safety in the free states and Canada” (15). Foner’s deep contextualization and the breadth of his narrative offer two primary contributions. First, he relies on the accounts of operatives to explain how the Underground Railroad actually functioned. Using these sources, Foner explains in detail how enslaved African Americans escaped, and how northerners aided them. Thus he reveals how the Underground Railroad developed over time and increased in complexity in response to the tumult of the 1850s. Second, Foner situates the Underground Railroad within a broad historical context. The development of the abolition movement, for example, and the divisions within it, affected the development of the Underground Railroad. And, in helping fugitives to escape, Underground Railroad operatives contributed to the escalation of sectional tension that led to the Civil War. The book begins with Foner’s description of the process of emancipation that created a free black population in New York City. This new free black population quickly created an urban infrastructure that increased the chances for enslaved African Americans to escape successfully. Whereas Foner reminds readers that “as long as slavery has existed, slaves have escaped to freedom,” he shows that the Underground Railroad began with the interracial abolition movement in the 1830s (30). In response to the related issues of fugitive slaves and the kidnapping of free African Americans, in 1835 New Yorkers created the New York Committee of Vigilance, which was dedicated to protecting free African Americans through the court system and to aiding fugitives arriving in the city. Within the committee, there were divisions between those who called for direct action and those who preferred to focus on racial uplift. The first leader of the Committee of Vigilance, David Ruggles, favored direct action, but some leaders of the African American community believed that direct action, often in the form of mob violence, violated calls for racial uplift. In the 1840s the Underground Railroad became a “patchwork system” that “depended for its effectiveness on political and personal networks” (101). [End Page 584] And whereas infighting continued, and the New York abolitionists sometimes worked at cross-purposes with William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, as Foner puts it, “Aiding fugitives was an activity in which warring abolitionists could and did cooperate” (98). The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law created a “crisis” in the free black community, but it was this period, the 1850s, that marked the Underground Railroad’s “heyday” (151). The measures of the new law made black freedom in the northern states perilous, and so abolitionists began sending more fugitives to Canada, intensifying their operations to meet the emergency rather than succumbing to the law’s threat to prosecute those who helped fugitives escape. In the 1850s, local networks of operatives extended along the East Coast connecting major metropolises to upstate New York and to Canada. In his most intriguing chapter, Foner introduces readers to Sydney Howard Gay, an operative who kept detailed records on more than two hundred fugitives who passed through his office between 1855 and 1856. Gay recorded the motivations of fugitive slaves, their origins, and their methods of escape. Thus we learn that most fugitives were young, and...

To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement

The antislavery movement entered an important new phase when William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator in 1831—a phase marked by massive petition campaigns, the extraordinary mobilization of female activists, and the creation of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society. While the period from 1831 to 1865 is known as the heyday of radical abolitionism, the work of Garrison’s predecessors in Massachusetts was critical in laying the foundation for antebellum abolitionism. To Plead Our Own Cause explores the significant contributions of African Americans in the Bay State to both local and nationwide antislavery activity before 1831 and demonstrates that their efforts represent nothing less than the beginning of organized abolitionist activity in America. Fleshing out the important links between Reformed theology, the institution of slavery, and the rise of the antislavery movement, author Christopher Cameron argues that African Americans in Massachusetts initiated organized abolitionism in America and that their antislavery ideology had its origins in Puritan thought and the particular system of slavery that this religious ideology shaped in Massachusetts. The political activity of black abolitionists was central in effecting the abolition of slavery and the slave trade within the Bay State, and it was likewise key in building a national antislavery movement in the years of the early republic. Even while abolitionist strategies were evolving, much of the rhetoric and tactics that well-known abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass employed in the mid-nineteenth century had their origins among blacks in Massachusetts during the eighteenth century.

Cheryl C. Boots. Singing for Equality: Hymns in the American Antislavery and Indian Rights Movements, 1640–1855.

Seldom utilized effectively by today's interpreters, hymns and metrical psalms are fundamental sources for the history of American religious culture. These ritual texts and their paired tunes were ubiquitous in colonial and antebellum America, legitimating cultural institutions and practices while also holding the potential to inspire change. In this ambitious study, Cheryl C. Boots explores hymns as agents of change before the Civil War and their role in the struggle to achieve racial equality for African Americans and Native Americans. Boots begins her survey with John Eliot's efforts to share Puritan psalmody with his indigenous “praying towns” in seventeenth-century Massachusetts and ends with hymn texts in the abolition fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Wells Brown. Along the way she offers short treatments of hymns in the work of Samson Occom, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, Richard Allen, Jarena Lee, William Apess and Mary Apess, Lydia Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold Boudinot, Catherine Beecher, David Walker, Maria W. Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Maria Weston Chapman, and William Lloyd Garrison. She contrasts hymn use by these egalitarian writers with references to singing in white establishmentarian works like Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826). She also examines four important egalitarian hymnals, Occom's A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs: Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians of All Denominations (1774), Allen's The African Methodist Pocket Hymn Book (1816), the American Anti-Slavery Society's Freedom's Lyre (1840), and Brown's The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848).

“Such a Great Light”: Letters to Louisa and Abba Alcott from the Holley School for Freed People and the Story of Winnie Beale's Emancipation

Historical Introduction1One night in Lottsburgh2 on Virginia's Northern Neck-maybe it was April, probably in 1876-Sam Blackwell (ca. 1815-?) sat with his fellow nightschool students in the classroom of the Holley School as his teacher, Caroline Putnam (1826-1917), aloud the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). As Putnam reached a stopping place, Blackwell interjected: is the most familiarest book ever heard (letter 7, below). Caroline Putnam is known to historians as a founder of the school-one of the early schools in Virginia for freed people after the Civil War. It certainly makes sense that she would have been reading the Douglass Narrative; Frederick Douglass (1818-95) and Caroline Putnam knew one another as fellow members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and Douglass was one of the prominent abolitionists whom Putnam had asked to serve as bondsmen for her installation as Lottsburgh's postmistress. The Narrative was a text with which Putnam was intimately familiar. While less is known about Sam Blackwell, one may well imagine the impact of the Narrative on him. Given that the conversation took place in the night-school classes at the Holley School, Blackwell and his fellow students were likely emancipated slaves-eleven years after the end of the war and thirteen after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, there were still many freed people in the area seeking an education for themselves and their children. The 1870 census for Lottsburgh, Virginia, shows that Samuel Blackwell (age 56) was a farmer and a resident of Lottsburgh and husband to Mary Blackwell (age 55), with Virginia (age 20), Novella (age 11), and Auther (age 12) also in the household.3 The form suggests that Samuel was literate (as the boxes for cannot read and cannot were not checked for him, as they were for Mary and Virginia) and notes that Auther attended school within the year-no doubt also at Holley School.It is likely that Sam Blackwell was related to Glasgow Blackwell (dates unknown), who had, back in November of 1868, welcomed Putnam when she had first been installed as the new schoolmistress.4 Said Glasgow Blackwell in his address to the assembled, They told me they would break my fingers off close to my hand if they catched me with a book in it. But now our children will have this good chance to learn to write, . . . and they will have to come to our children to get their business done (qtd. in Herbig 243-44). Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative, had instructed the reader in the crucial importance of his own literacy in making his escape from slavery possible: I wished to learn how to write, as have occasion to write my own pass (280). While thanking his young teachers, however-the hungry little urchins of the Baltimore streets-Douglass made clear that he would not name them, as it might embarrass them; for it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to in this Christian country (278). As Caroline Putnam this story to Sam Blackwell's class, certainly he would have understood that education-forbidden under slavery to his kinsmen, to Frederick Douglass, and to himself-would help to make his life, and that of his community, more navigable, though it would still be condemned by many, for both student and teacher.The blacks of Lottsburgh, Virginia, however, were clearly ready to face the risks and challenges of getting an education. As Heather Andrea Williams writes in Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom about her findings related to postbellum black education,It made perfect sense that someone who had climbed into a hole in the woods to attend school would, in freedom, sacrifice time and money to build a schoolhouse. It rang true that people who waited up until ten o'clock at night to sneak off to classes on the plantation would want to establish schools in the open as soon as they possibly could. (5)It would have been a self-evident truth to the enslaved and ultimately emancipated people of the South that education would be essential to their very survival, let alone their economic advancement. …

The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey by E. Fuller Torrey (review)

The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey. By E. Fuller Torrey. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Pp. 248. Cloth, $39.95.)Reviewed by Nikki TaylorHistory has waited far too long for a comprehensive biography of abolitionist Charles Torrey, who played an instrumental role in pushing the movement to become more political. Author E. Fuller Torrey has answered that call in The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey. Most who have written about Torrey primarily portray him as one of William Lloyd Garrison's chief nemeses, who helped orchestrate the split in the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s. E. Fuller Torrey not only offers a sympathetic read of Charles Torrey's motivations in that effort but also demonstrates that he actually contributed so much more to the abolitionist cause in his short thirty-two years of life.By stringently rejecting Garrison's moral suasion, Charles Torrey insisted on and then aggressive and radical abolitionism as alternative strategies (183). As practical applications of his beliefs, he helped establish the Liberty Party and managed the Washington, DC, artery of the Underground Railroad. Eventually, political abolitionism and abolitionist editing ceased to satisfy Charles Torrey, so he decided to take his activism to the next level. Unlike most white Underground Railroad operators who did not believe in going into the South to entice African Americans from bondage, Torrey's religious and moral convictions motivated him to do just that. He actively encouraged slaves to abscond from slavery and then transported them to freedom himself. For him, this type of abolitionism was a more direct and decided attack on slaveholding than either his work in the abolitionist press or political abolitionism had been. Torrey's Underground Railroad activism included a brazen plan that centered on wresting the bondspeople from many prominent politicians, to cause political embarrassment and undermine the system in the nation's capital. He was effective enough in this endeavor that he became an enemy to powerful southern congressmen and other politicians, ultimately leading to his arrest, conviction, and imprisonment in 1844 for slave stealing. His death in prison two years later at the age of thirty-two is why Charles Torrey has been considered an abolitionist martyr.The biggest strength of this project is the masterful job of contextualizing Torrey within the world of antebellum abolitionists. The animus between Charles Torrey and William Lloyd Garrison (13-15) is laid bare. The author presents that relationship in terms of the two men's dissimilar class backgrounds, morals, and levels of self-control, as much as their concerns about politics, religion, and abolitionist tactics. …

Anti-Slavery's Panoramic Perspective

From its outset, the US anti-slavery movement embraced new visual technologies and modes of visual display to bring slavery into focus. Pictorial representations of slavery were central to the campaign. In the 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) circulated some 40,000 depictions of slavery a year, ranging from woodcuts and broadsides to engravings and portraits (J. Wilson 354). This extensive iconographical system was deployed and recycled throughout the antebellum period. Emerging simultaneously with the rise of mass visual culture in the United States, the anti-slavery movement took full advantage of its society’s interest in the image and belief in the visual’s unique ability to persuade.1 As The Emancipator argues, “Abolitionists know the influence of visual impressions. … In consequence, they will make appeals through the eye to the heart and understanding.” According to The Emancipator, pictures were able to “excite the mind,” “awaken and fix attention,” and arouse feeling. The image’s immediacy, along with its perceptual capacities and emotive power, successfully turns its viewer into an “eye-witness” to slavery’s cruelties as well as a “partaker” of the slave’s woes (“Pictorials” Feb. 1836). The visual simultaneously produces a sense of the real—a “correct and vivid impression of living reality” as The Emancipator puts it (“Pictorials” 5 May 1836)—and arouses sympathy for the slave, since the eye is an “avenue to the heart and the conscience of the community,” as the Executive Committee of the AASS states (Wright). A central component of the anti-slavery appeal, the image provided both graphical accuracy and emotional effectiveness.

The American Experience: The Abolitionists by Rob Rapley (review)

Reviewed by: The American Experience: The Abolitionists by Rob Rapley Carol Faulkner The American Experience: The Abolitionists. Producer Rob Rapley. Executive Producer Sharon Grimberg. WGBH Boston, 2013. 151 minutes. Marking the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, this three-part documentary traces the history of the radical antislavery movement through the interconnected lives of (in order of appearance) Angelina Grimké, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown. While some of these reformers receive more attention than others, the documentary places abolitionists at the center of the national struggle over slavery and serves as a useful challenge to the popular portrayal of emancipation in Stephen Spielberg's film Lincoln (2012). As the narrator states at the end of part 2, these abolitionists, with their passion and perseverance, forced Americans to take sides on the slavery issue. The documentary is less clear on how they did so and what it took to sustain a movement for forty years. Its surprising strength is the actors who play the five abolitionists; they capture the spirit and drive of activists like Garrison and Grimké, who in still images appear cold and unappealing to undergraduates. With each episode lasting just over fifty minutes, the documentary will work well in the classroom. The first part is the strongest and most compelling, following the spark of abolition in each of the main characters. Grimké fights a lonely battle in her native South Carolina slaveholding family, leaving the south for Philadelphia, and eventually, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). Douglass experiences the brutality of the peculiar institution as a slave in Maryland. A devout Christian, Garrison converts from gradualism to immediatism after living and working with African Americans in Baltimore. Stowe observes the controversy surrounding abolitionism in the border city of Cincinnati. The murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy kindles Brown's Calvinist fire. This part is not without its frustrations: The filmmakers and historians ignore Quakers who, even with their limitations, were the only whites to consistently oppose slavery before the 1820s. Instead, the historians associate the abolitionist strategy of moral suasion [End Page 83] with evangelical Christianity, ignoring these abolitionists' various and evolving religious perspectives. In Baltimore, for example, Garrison worked for Quaker newspaper editor Benjamin Lundy. After Grimké moved to Philadelphia, the Society of Friends became her spiritual home. The filmmakers, whose work is produced for American Experience/WGBH, also miss opportunities to discuss the geographic diversity of the antislavery movement (in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, or Rochester) for a Boston-centric interpretation. Part 1 concludes with Grimké's marriage to fellow abolitionist Theodore Weld and the ideological differences that split the AASS in 1840. In parts 2 and 3, the individual biographies are overwhelmed by a more national history. As is fitting, Douglass emerges as the main character, beginning with his escape from slavery and his alliance and subsequent break with Garrison. Here, Garrison appears as a strategic foil for Douglass and Brown, with no attempt made to grasp his continuing commitment to nonviolence. The documentary also shifts to the familiar national drama: the War with Mexico, the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act, and the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's grief after her son's death from cholera and her shared emotional pain with slave mothers separated from their children inspired a great antislavery novel, but she is out of place in a documentary about abolitionists. The film rightfully credits her novel with convincing many Americans that slavery was wrong, but it fails to mention that Uncle Tom's Cabin advocated colonization rather than abolition. Further, the filmmakers do not connect Stowe's novel to the painstaking research and revelations in Angelina and Theodore Weld's American Slavery As It Is, which the filmmakers mention in part 1. In the third part, the violent conflict over slavery builds, with the caning of Charles Sumner, Bleeding Kansas, John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry, the Civil War, and, finally, emancipation. With comments from experts such as David W. Blight, R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Tony Horwitz, and John Stauffer, this episode illuminates the dynamic relationship between Douglass and Brown. Instead of Lincoln the emancipator, the documentary reveals Douglass's...