Antislavery Politics Research Articles

When Regulation Was Religious: College Philanthropy, Antislavery Politics, and Accreditation in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century West

The college accreditation movement that arose at the turn of the twentieth century had an important antecedent in the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West. Founded in 1843, this nondenominational philanthropy aspired to direct the development of higher education by dispersing eastern funds to Protestant colleges that met its standards for instruction, administration, and piety. For all its ambitions, the Society did not always offer dependable or disinterested supervision. Its relationships with Knox College and Iowa College (now Grinnell) exposed its shortcomings. Coinciding with the rising sectional conflict over slavery, the activities of these institutions forced the regulatory association to engage in the very brand of ecclesiastical politics it had vowed to transcend. This article shows how institutional resistance and church rivalry helped delay the growth of accreditation until the turn of the twentieth century, when secular organizations took up the reins of regulation.

Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics by Corey M. Brooks

Reviewed by: Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politicsby Corey M. Brooks John H. Matsui Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics. By Corey M. Brooks. American Beginnings, 1500–1900. ( Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. [viii], 302. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-226-30728-2.) Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politicssets out to reintegrate antislavery third parties into the history of antebellum politics. Corey M. Brooks focuses on the decades-long campaign [End Page 678]of political abolitionists to contest and expose the slave power's control of national politics, culminating in the birth of the explicitly antislavery Republican Party by the mid-1850s. In analyzing primary sources on the political wing of the antislavery movement, Brooks sails between the Scylla of antislavery hagiography and the Charybdis of proslavery screeds. Most crucial to Brooks's thesis among recent scholarship is James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865(New York, 2012). As Oakes notes, by the 1850s three constituencies—political abolitionists, antislavery moderates, and slaveholders—recognized that if the federal government ceased to treat slaves as property, voluntary state abolition would follow. Abolitionists quickly recognized that Congress was the linchpin to fight the slave power; slaveholders' interests were disproportionately represented in both houses thanks to the three-fifths clause. Even as the American abolitionist movement fractured in the late 1830s over women's rights and pacifism, the volume of antislavery voices calling for a purely antislavery third party increased. Although many abolitionist voters chose to support the Whig Party in 1840, that election saw the birth of the Liberty Party. The Liberty Party had two potential goals: "achieving national political victory or pressuring one or both of the major parties to adopt an unequivocally antislavery platform" (p. 78). The chronology moves forward predictably for historians familiar with antislavery politics. Conscience Whigs and Liberty men gave way to Free Soilers in the wake of opposition to the invasion of Mexico and debate over the Wilmot Proviso, followed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) giving birth to the Republican Party as the Whigs fell apart. Yet Brooks places far more emphasis in Liberty Poweron prominent congressional posts than Richard H. Sewell dedicated to such seats in his foundational text on antislavery politics, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860(New York, 1976). Brooks pays close attention to contests over the speakership of the House of Representatives, a post that readers of Leonard L. Richards's The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860(Baton Rouge, 2009) will know was occupied by slaveholders for two-thirds of the years through 1850. Republican Nathaniel P. Banks's successful campaign for this seat in 1856 thus marked a crucial moment in antislavery politicians' long war to craft a viable congressional coalition. Banks was a recent convert to the Republican ranks, and his candidacy united Republicans and nativist Know-Nothings. The Republican Party embodied the culmination of decades of labor by Liberty men and Free Soilers to found a voluntary association with millions of members dedicated to thwarting the mastery of slaveholding politicians over free state voters by "divorcing the federal government from slavery" (p. 211). Brooks's book deserves to be read in tandem with This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy(Cambridge, Mass., 2016) by Matthew Karp. As Karp demonstrates, the antislavery politicians Brooks studies faced a very confident—not isolationist—group of slaveholding politicians who had global ambitions. If Britain was an antislavery and antidemocratic empire by 1833, if not 1807, as is acknowledged in Liberty [End Page 679] Power, then the growing global influence of the British empire is seen as an existential threat to American slavery by the influential southern politicians Karp studies. Liberty Powermisses an opportunity to contribute to the historiography of antislavery politics in a transnational context by not paying more attention to trends in British politics from 1833, but then it would not be the book that Brooks promises his readers. John H. Matsui Virginia Military Institute Copyright...

Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists by Bruce Laurie

Reviewed by: Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists by Bruce Laurie Matthew Mason (bio) Keywords Abolition, Slavery, Antislavery, Massachusetts, David Ruggles Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists. By Bruce Laurie. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 178. Cloth, $80.00, Paper, $22.95.) This latest monograph from an established historian of abolition examines five abolitionists from Northampton, Massachusetts. African American abolitionist David Ruggles is the best known of the five, although Laurie posits that the Free Soil and Republican Party politician Erastus Hopkins was the most significant of them. Taken together, these profiles illustrate the greatly varied nature of abolitionism even within one locality. The individual biographical sketches are illuminating, but the reader has to do almost all the work of discerning the larger significance of this collective picture. [End Page 181] Although Laurie apologetically included no women and only one African American in his five subjects, this group features a real socioeconomic assortment, from the wealthy businessman John Payton Williston through the political editor Henry S. Gere to the displaced free black man Ruggles. They also occupied a wide range along the spectrum of antislavery belief and action, disagreeing on questions such as whether to actively aid the Underground Railroad or to support John Brown. They also differed—as was abolitionists’ wont—on the efficacy of political action. In short, what Laurie says of Williston might well be said of his other subjects: He was “a contradictory figure who might give pause to modern-day readers in need of an iconic abolitionist” (84). Laurie’s narrative also highlights the complex context within which antislavery politics operated in antebellum Northampton, interacting with a wide range of other political, moral, and economic issues. His actors took diverse stances on those other questions and assigned them differing levels of priority. Their divergent positions at times rose to the level of conflict. For instance, while Sylvester Judd saw his staunch support for the Working-Men’s movement and his antislavery as “opposite sides of the same antiestablishment coin,” the industrialist Williston fought against child labor reform (23). Laurie’s “fine-grained treatment of the local scene” thus shows that “how antislavery politics played out on the ground” was rarely neat and tidy (3). Laurie is committed to making comparisons and contrasts among his five individuals, and to placing their individual stories within the appropriate contexts of sectional, state, and local politics. But he seems uninterested in explicitly developing the significance of his characters beyond the local. “None of” his figures besides Ruggles, he admits, “has ever figured in a popular or academic account of the abolitionist movement,” and this book never makes it clear why they should (1). Laurie is enough of an academic historian and makes enough historiographical forays that it would be unfair to dismiss this book as an exercise in local antiquarianism. But his historiographical passages are very few and dwell on micro points, rather than developing an argument or intervention in the literature for the book as a whole. The Acknowledgements section makes it clear that Laurie’s editors at University of Massachusetts Press were not inclined to stretch him beyond this posture, when he quotes them as saying that “we like” Northampton abolitionists “and have special affection for locals” (ix). While both producing parties thus seem to have settled for a rather [End Page 182] modest goal, it remains true that they reached it. For this book does provide readers “with a deeper and richer understanding of the meaning of political abolitionism in a particular place and time”—if they are willing to do a fair amount of the heavy intellectual lifting themselves (8). Matthew Mason Matthew Mason is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University. He is the author of various books and articles on slavery and politics, including Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016). Copyright © 2017 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border by Christopher Phillips

Reviewed by: The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border by Christopher Phillips Michael E. Woods The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border. By Christopher Phillips. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xxii, 505. $36.95, ISBN 978-0-1951-8723-6.) In her account of Eliza's escape from Kentucky to Ohio, Harriet Beecher Stowe dramatized the Ohio River as a physical and symbolic border between slavery and freedom. But Stowe's long-term residence in Cincinnati taught her that rivers connect people at least as much as they divide them. She knew about the city's bleak history of racist violence and discrimination and understood locals' personal and commercial ties to the slave states. In the conclusion to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Stowe urged northerners to confront their own complicity in slavery. Today, however, the mighty Ohio demarcates an apparently fixed regional boundary. Postcards dub Louisville, Kentucky, the gateway to the South, while historical markers on the Ohio's northern bank celebrate the gateways to freedom that fugitive slaves used. Christopher Phillips's excellent book suggests that this regional split was more a product than a cause of the Civil War, which Abraham Lincoln allegedly attributed to Stowe's novel. Phillips examines Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana as a cohesive region knitted together by familial, economic, cultural, and political ties and characterized by white residents' dedication to the Union and white supremacy alike. Before the Civil War, white people in this "middle border" region regarded themselves as westerners and heirs to a tradition of compromise emblematized by statesmen like Henry "Harry of the West" Clay. Though separated into slave and free portions, the middle border states had much in common. The Northwest Ordinance notwithstanding, bound black labor persisted north of the Ohio, particularly in southern Illinois's salt industry, and racial discrimination was pervasive. Eager to develop the region's [End Page 980] economy without inflaming political controversy, border whites gravitated toward conservative measures like colonization and assailed free black people and their abolitionist allies. Secession and the outbreak of war initially reinforced the white consensus by provoking ire against Republican crusaders and cotton state fire-eaters. Many border residents hoped for a last-ditch compromise, and some, especially in Kentucky, sought to remain neutral. But they could not keep the war and its revolutionary consequences at bay. In Missouri and Kentucky, alternate occupations by Confederate and Union troops forced white residents to juggle competing priorities and ultimately to choose sides. Could a proslavery Kentucky Unionist convince Confederates that she was a southerner? When blue-clad Yankees arrived, would it be safe to do so? Across the Ohio, free-state dissenters opposed the Lincoln administration and rejected Republicans' partisan definitions of patriotism. Neighbors turned against each other as shifting loyalties and wartime polarization provoked considerable violence, seen most famously in the guerrilla warfare that ravaged Missouri and Kentucky. Nothing did more to inflame conflict and shatter the western consensus than emancipation. Despite the border states' exemption from the Emancipation Proclamation, the radicalization of the Union war effort—including the enlistment of black soldiers—pushed some proslavery Unionists toward the Confederacy while enabling Republicans to equate loyalty with antislavery politics. On both sides of the Ohio, whites were divided over the propriety and legality of emancipation. But overall, the issue sharpened the emerging North/South binary, "splintering the moderate western consensus and driving a wedge between the middle border's free and slave states" (p. 211). An Indiana steamboat passenger's loudly stated preference for traveling alongside "'niggers'" (black Union soldiers) rather than "'rebels'" (white southern women) clarified the war's impact: racism persisted, but the prewar consensus had been demolished by sectional loyalty politics (p. 265). Wartime animosities lingered long after 1865 because the region's cultural politics replaced the old consensus. White Missourians and Kentuckians wrote themselves into the history of the Old South and the Confederacy, though most of them had worn the Union blue. White Ohioans, Indianans, and Illinoisans burnished their northern credentials by celebrating the Underground Railroad and contrasting their orderly, progressive communities with the alleged...

The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863 By Andrew K. Diemer

Reviewed by: The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863 By Andrew K. Diemer Christopher Bonner (bio) The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863. By Andrew K. Diemer. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. 312. Cloth, $49.95.) In January 1817, a group of black Pennsylvanians held a meeting that resulted in a unanimous denunciation of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and its program of removing black people from the United States. [End Page 478] This is perhaps one of the best-known moments in antebellum black politics—a well-documented collective gathering that produced a clear political statement that black people were Americans. Andrew Diemer adds valuable texture to this well-worn story. He notes that despite the oft-cited unanimity of the gathering, James Forten, a wealthy black Philadelphian and vocal protest leader, was initially undecided on colonization but that popular black sentiment swayed his opinion. Diemer also frames this meeting as being about more than the ACS. The gathered activists made "an argument about … the place of African Americans in the United States," issuing a public statement on an urgent legal and social issue for the country (20). Through moments like this anticolonization meeting, The Politics of Black Citizenship offers insightful analysis of antebellum black politics that positions that activist work alongside state and national debate about the shape of the country and black peoples' place within it. Diemer's work is localized in the areas surrounding Baltimore and Philadelphia, two cities with large free black populations, which he explores as a borderland connected by commerce and developing transportation technologies. Divided by a legal boundary between slavery and freedom, this region became a center of conflict concerning fugitive slaves, resulting in contentious encounters that wove black and antislavery activism into discussions about state and federal law. The connections between these communities across the border of freedom gave particular legal and political meanings to black protest. The border is critical to understanding black and antislavery politics in both Baltimore and Philadelphia. Anticolonization was a critical foundation for antebellum black politics; challenging removal projects was a prerequisite to seeking rights as American people. Diemer opens by noting that the ACS appealed to some black Americans such as Paul Cuffe, who saw colonization as the seed of a "cosmopolitan black Atlantic community" (15). Ultimately, black people opposed the ACS because they recognized it as a project of defining the United States as a white man's republic and the potential root of a variety of inequalities based on race. In addition to intracommunity dynamics revealed through people like Forten, Diemer is explicit about the long reach of protest against the ACS. Newspapers from as far away as Kentucky printed records of the 1817 meeting, helping black people insert their voices into the discourse on membership in the nation. Colonization was fundamentally about citizenship, as it aimed to determine who could claim a place in the country. Diemer points out that, in the 1820s, Haiti appealed to people like Richard Allen, who saw opportunities for equality in the black republic and evidence of black capability that could be deployed in protest in the United States. Black Americans were [End Page 479] interested in Haiti because it offered possibilities for political participation, which many framed as an essential aspect of a citizenship that went beyond the ability to claim a place within a nation. Citizenship was an ill-defined legal concept in the early nineteenth century. As Diemer notes, it was useful to black activists because its meaning was unspecified. At times, though, The Politics of Black Citizenship misses opportunities to analyze the ways black and white people thought about the concept and the work they did to specify and codify its meaning. Black Pennsylvanians, Diemer says, saw little hope for "full legal equality" in the late 1820s, and so they framed their work "as a struggle for black citizenship" (62). Did these men and women understand citizenship as something different from, or less than, legal equality? If so, what did it mean to them, and what might their ideas indicate about the nature of citizenship...

The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824’s Five-Horse Race by Donald Ratcliffe

Reviewed by: The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824’s Five-Horse Race by Donald Ratcliffe Padraig Riley (bio) The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824’s Five-Horse Race. By Donald Ratcliffe. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. Pp. xiii, 354. $34.95 cloth) This fine book provides a detailed overview of the election of 1824, when the reigning Democratic-Republican coalition collapsed into a complex race for the presidency. Too often seen as a bizarre prelude to the populist accession of Andrew Jackson in 1828, Donald Ratcliffe demonstrates that 1824 was a fracture point, exposing the conflicting social and ideological forces that shaped antebellum America. Part One examines the four chief contenders for the presidency and their sources of regional and ideological support (the fifth horse in the race, John C. Calhoun, dropped out early and settled for the vice presidency). Ratcliffe’s attention to the politics of slavery and his command of state-level politics make for a persuasive revision of a well-known narrative. The official candidate of the Republican congressional caucus, William Crawford, had strong support in Virginia, where slaveholders turned hard toward states’ rights after the Missouri Crisis and the Panic of 1819. Kentucky’s Henry Clay helped Missouri enter the Union as a slave state, and westerners north and south supported his call for an “American System” of federally sponsored internal improvements. But Virginia conservatives were wary of Clay, as well as of Andrew Jackson, whom they feared as a military leader likely to embrace broad construction and federal power. These [End Page 283] divisions in southern ranks opened the door for a northern candidate to win the presidency. Jackson’s past campaigns against Britain and Native Americans won him support among western settlers, while Pennsylvania democrats embraced Jackson and his military glory to fight state-level battles. But John Quincy Adams had countervailing support in New England, New York, and parts of the old Northwest, where many voters refused to elect another slaveholding president. Ratcliffe builds a compelling case for the persistence of northern antislavery politics after the Missouri Crisis. His composite portrait of 1824 describes a nation far more riven by sectional division over slavery than previous historians have allowed. Part Two tells the story of the election. When no candidate won a majority in the Electoral College, the contest moved to the House, where Adams prevailed despite finishing second to Jackson in the electoral vote. Clay and his supporters backed Adams in what Jacksonians termed a “corrupt bargain”; Ratcliffe more accurately describes the Adams-Clay alliance as the origin of the Whig Party, binding together advocates of Clay’s American System and northern antislavery voters. Traditionally, historians have argued that Jackson won the popular vote in 1824, thus rendering Adams’s presidency an aberration without a mandate. But as Ratcliffe provocatively asserts, “In no way was Jackson the clear choice of the people in 1824” (p. 3). Jackson did prevail in states where electors were chosen by popular vote, but Adams had the edge in states where the legislature decided the electoral vote, including New York, the largest state in the Union. Adams owed his New York victory to a popular movement against Martin Van Buren, who had engineered the legislative selection of electors in order to keep the state in Crawford’s column. Adams partisans fought back against Van Buren’s attempt to perpetuate the Democratic-Republican coalition and suppress sectional dissent. Ratcliffe estimates that Adams would have received 40 percent of the popular vote in New York. In this counterfactual, Adams, not Jackson, was the people’s top choice. Scholars will quibble with this calculation as well as other details [End Page 284] in the book, but there is little doubt that Ratcliffe’s work serves as a thorough introduction to the election of 1824. Even more important, his analysis should force historians to rethink long-held assumptions about the rise of American democracy. Padraig Riley PADRAIG RILEY is the author of Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (2015). Copyright © 2017 Kentucky Historical Society

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. By Adam Wesley Dean

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era . Civil War America Series. By Adam Wesley Dean. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. x + 230 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $29.95, paper.) It is always tempting as a historian to read the news and imagine identifying the seeds of contemporary events. Sometimes we find the smoking gun, but other times the connections are elusive—more hunch than fact. In An Agrarian Republic , historian Adam Wesley Dean believes the seeds of the contemporary anti-government wise use movement were sown in the formation of the antebellum Republican Party that elevated Abraham Lincoln into the presidency. Dean specifically claims that the same impulses that led Americans to abandon the Whig and American … blynn{at}ksu.edu

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean (review)

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean (review)

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era

Review of: An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era, by Adam Wesley Dean

Plowed Earth Policies

Plowed Earth Policies Steven Stoll (bio) Adam Wesley Dean. An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 240pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. R. Douglas Hurt. Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 364pp. Tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. At the end of the Civil War, Winslow Homer painted a man swinging a scythe in a wheat field. The man has set aside his Union coat and canteen and puts his back into the work. The grain and a blue sky radiate around him like a halo. We cannot see his face, a view that renders him no particular veteran in a new field but every veteran. He is the people as a whole, the strength and optimism of a unified Union. The scythe symbolizes the death he escaped and the life he is making on the Prairie or the Great Plains. The Veteran in a New Field is more than an expression of armistice. It speaks to a vision of politics and society that preceded the war, a conception of the rural household as the fundamental unit of the Republic. The language of agrarian possession saturated political speech in the North. The outcome of the war depended as much on the price of corn in the South as it did on Lee’s strategies and the number of casualties. In two recent books, Adam Wesley Dean and R. Douglas Hurt explore different aspects of the agrarian history of the Civil War era. There is a longstanding relationship between farmers and war. The citizen-soldier was often a husbandman. Think of ancient Greece’s hoplites and the minutemen of Concord. Both stilled their plows and fell into formation under officers who also conceived of themselves as plain practical yeomen. In the mythology of nationalism, the farmer embodies blood and soil. Governments and monarchs come and go, but nations continually emerge from an agrarian fusion of The People and The Land. Lal Pahadur, Prime Minister of India, declared in 1965: “Hail the soldier. Hail the farmer.”1 Pakistan had just attacked India, and the country needed food and fighters. But note the implicit contradiction. Farmers charging in battlefields are not laboring in wheat fields. In societies that depend primarily on agriculture in the household mode of [End Page 104] production, the same people fulfill both roles. The tension between ideology and materialism opens rich ground for interpretation. Dean’s An Agrarian Republic is a tour through the Republican notion that smallholders formed the stronghold of the Union, that they distinguished the free North from the enslaved South. In Dean’s telling, the party conceived of itself as representing the interests of farmers, putting them forth as the rightful occupants of the Great Plains and California. The free-soil arguments of the 1850s make no sense without farmers as the instruments of political ideology, and even the establishment of Yosemite National Park owes something to the same sense of land well managed. One recurrent subject in the book is the division of land and its distribution by government in order to accomplish social ends. Dean does great work by excavating the tangled arguments for and against the Homestead Act, first passed by Congress in 1860 and vetoed by President James Buchanan. Whigs sought to deploy white smallholders across the public domain for a variety of reasons. Quarter-section wheat farms would increase food and population, block the expansion of plantations, and establish the region as the dominion of whites. Southerners saw the bill as a political land grab. In his veto, Bu-chanan claimed that it would drain Tennessee and Kentucky of its agrarians, and he believed that settlement in the West would “demoralize the people” (p. 96). The bill passed again in 1862, and President Abraham Lincoln signed it. Representative George Washington Julian of Indiana had advocated the law for decades. The Homestead Act wrapped landed possession in racial politics. Every discussion of the future of the public domain had to do with who would be given small pieces...

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era

The Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. By Adam Wesley Dean (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2015) 230 pp. $29.95

<i>The Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era</i>. By Adam Wesley Dean (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2015) 230 pp. $29.95

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean (review)

Reviewed by: An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean Ginette Aley (bio) An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. By Adam Wesley Dean. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 230. $29.95 paper) It is hard to imagine that any historian would teach or write about the United States during the Civil War era as comprised of a simple dichotomy of two regions: industrial North versus agrarian South. This, despite our understanding that the 1860 census shows that most Americans overall were involved in agriculture. As both a long-time college textbook consultant and Civil War era scholar (with a specialization in agricultural history), I can say this reflects an older, widely superseded interpretation; yet, this is the corrective that Adam Wesley Dean’s An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era seeks to make. Dean’s leading argument is that the political ideology of the Republican Party of the Civil War era (beginning with the Free Soilers), aside from being antislavery, was at heart agrarian. As such, it aggressively promoted the interests of small family farmers and led ultimately to the passage of the Homestead Act, Pacific Railway Act, and the Morrill Land Grant College Act following the secession of the southern states. Dean extends this analysis of what he repeatedly categorizes as a Republican fixation on comparative land-use practices (and what they represented) to legislation creating Yosemite State Park [End Page 84] (1864) and Yellowstone National Park (1872). Dean’s problematic premise is that northerners and Republicans were more concerned over the expansion of slavery because of slave owners’ use and abuse of the land through plantation and monocrop agriculture than they were the immorality of slavery or the existence of slavery in a free republic. In contrast to northern family farms, which resulted in the wise use of the land and soil, he asserts, plantation agriculture generated land monopolies, aristocrats, and a lack of progress and civilization (although we know that the Homestead Act combined with subsequent land acts arguably led to similar scenarios in western lands, in some ranching and agricultural enterprises). An Agrarian Republic suffers from conceptual and interpretive errors, perhaps derived from a limited understanding of agricultural history, despite an indication from the subtitle that this is about farming. One would expect to see more than one farm paper and more of the relevant historiography than what is consulted here. From the outset and throughout, Dean overstates the evidence, often employing more modern environmentalist and subjective verbiage, in assertions like, “As the Republicans grew in popularity and power, they became convinced that the future of the country depended on the wise use of the soil” (p. 40). This minimizes, if not ignores, Republicans’ and northerners’ greater impetus to oppose the expansion of slavery—that is, a sense of urgency that the peculiar institution itself was a threat to the nation, not simply a threat to wise land use. Dean makes interesting use of published observations and warnings about the soil-depleting effects of slave agriculture, although he couches it in political ideology. This is actually reflective of the literature of agrarian reform impulses, North and South, some of which were clearly co-opted by sectional politicians as yet another valid reason to either oppose slavery or reform agricultural practices. Rather than being part and parcel of Republican ideology, Dean fails to appreciate that these are broader expressions of agrarian reform and the rise of agricultural science, hence the drive behind the Morrill Land Grant College Act. A stronger argument would be that reformers [End Page 85] asserted that not only was southern slavery on the wrong side of history, but increasingly on the wrong side of agricultural science. Nevertheless, halting the spread of slavery was the overriding issue of antislavery politics, not land use. Ginette Aley GINETTE ALEY teaches history at Washburn University and is a Carey Fellow in the History Department at Kansas State University. She is the co-editor of Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War (2013) and the...

The Transatlantic Roots of Irish American Anti-Abolitionism, 1843–1859

That most immigrants opposed both abolitionist reformers and antislavery politicians in antebellum era was beyond dispute to contemporaries in all three camps. As early as 1842, abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison perceived and made it his mission to disrupt stupendous conspiracy ... between leading Demagogues, leading pseudo democrats, and southern slaveholders. More than a decade later, a Know Nothing Party-affiliated newspaper in Concord, New Hampshire, blamed the ignorance and superstition of a half a million semi-civilized voters for electoral successes of proslavery politicians. American newspaper editors disputed tenor if not specific complaint in these accusations. In 1856, New York Irish-American cheerfully acknowledged that Irish emigrants join Democratic Party and take sides against abolitionists before defending its readers against abolitionists' accusations that immigrants frequently and wantonly assaulted African Americans. (1) Scholarship on antislavery movement, antebellum sectional crisis, and immigration in Civil War era echoes contemporary consensus that Americans were foes to abolitionist reform and antislavery politics. (2) Historians are far from unanimous, however, in explaining why Americans were so singularly hostile to all shades of antislavery. Immigrants' fears of labor competition from freed slaves, their purported need to establish a white racial identity, their attachment to proslavery Democratic Party, and their receptiveness to influence of a proslavery American Catholic hierarchy have all weighed heavily in discussion. (3) Cumulatively, these explanations interpret American opposition to antislavery as a product of social, political, and cultural influences in America that shaped contours of immigrants' lives. Such an interpretation is useful in highlighting forces that acted on Americans as they encountered sectional politics and nascent industrial capitalist economy of antebellum America. But it can also convey impression that immigrants arrived in United States as blank slates, whose views on major social and political questions of day would be etched out by priests and ward bosses. Yet studies of Americans' involvement in Jacksonian-era politics, participation in Civil War, and resistance to exploitative labor conditions have shown that immigrants brought certain ideas and practices with them from Ireland. Under right circumstances, immigrants' backgrounds in Ireland or connections they maintained with their native land informed ways they adjusted to life in United States. (4) While history has featured prominently in more recent works on immigrants and antislavery, pre-famine era dominates scholarship. In years just prior to Great Potato Famine (1845-54), revered politician Daniel O'Connell insisted that on both sides of Atlantic--but especially Americans who supported his efforts to win political autonomy from Great Britain--make common cause with abolitionists. The historian Angela Murphy explains that Americans rejected O'Connell's antislavery pleas in order to demonstrate their bona fides as respectable American citizens who would not be beholden to foreign influences. On eve of famine migration, then, demands of loyalty to their adopted country led immigrants to spurn antislavery appeals from Ireland. Other works on pre-famine period similarly emphasize a contrast between popularity of antislavery in O'Connell's Ireland and an anti-abolitionist consensus among American Irish. (5) While most immigrants remained steadfastly opposed to antislavery throughout antebellum era, argument here is that basis of American anti-abolitionism shifted in late 1840s and early 1850s. …

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean

Adam Wesley Dean.An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. R. Douglas Hurt.Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South.

Adam Wesley Dean.<i>An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era</i>. R. Douglas Hurt.<i>Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South</i>.

Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era by Ethan J. Kytle (review)

Reviewed by: Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era by Ethan J. Kytle Sandra Harbert Petrulionis (bio) Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era. By Ethan J. Kytle. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 301. Cloth, $99.00.) As a collective biography after the manner of recent studies by John Stauffer, Leslie Butler, and Frederick Blue, Romantic Reformers and the [End Page 588] Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era presents the antislavery activism and writings of five antebellum reformers—two black men (Frederick Douglass and Martin Robison Delany), two white men (Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson), and one white woman (Harriet Beecher Stowe)—as foremost among a group Ethan Kytle designates “New Romantics.” Descended from first-generation abolitionists, especially William Lloyd Garrison, as well as from transatlantic Romantic figures and early American reformers, the New Romantics combined the immediatism and perfectionism of these forebears with myriad other tactics to reinvigorate an abolitionist arsenal capable of confronting the increasingly hostile political climate of the 1850s. Kytle argues that through a romantically infused strategy of self-culture, romantic racialism, sentimentalism, martial heroism, and even emigrationist manifest destiny, these five reformers “framed their objections and justified their actions chiefly on romantic grounds” (7). The diversity of this cohort also reminds us that a great strength of the antislavery movement in the prewar decade was its forging of bonds across race, class, and gender lines. Romantic Reformers is informed by copious use of archival correspondence and a thorough immersion in historiography, recent critical biography, and literary scholarship. It is especially strong in capturing the ambivalence of these activists as they broke with Garrison and embraced a “higher law” doctrine harmonious with militant resistance. Kytle examines the fraught nature of Transcendentalist Theodore Parker’s reflections on antislavery violence through the lens of his famous sermon, “A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity”; he proposes that Parker pragmatically opted for the permanence of a “higher law” rather than the transience of human-crafted edicts. Kytle contextualizes Parker’s romantic racialism as unfortunate evidence that the New Romantics occasionally bought into the notions of antebellum pseudoscience that posited particular personality traits as “race” dependent. Hence, Parker, whose racism has long been noted by scholars, believed that African Americans were by nature affectionate and meek, in contrast with Anglo-Saxon dominance and predisposition to violence in pursuit of liberty. This discussion would benefit from considering Parker’s disavowal of the theories and racism of Louis Agassiz, Harvard University’s premier zoologist and advocate of polygenism, especially in light of Agassiz’s chumminess with Parker’s fellow Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Where Parker’s evolution toward antislavery militance was deliberative, Frederick Douglass’s stride was more eager. Kytle considers Douglass a New Romantic mainly for his unshakable conviction in the democratic system and for his insistence on black self-help, including slave rebellion, as a [End Page 589] revolutionary notion of romantic self-culture. In this regard, Kytle expands on recent studies that view Douglass’s advocacy of slave rebellion as evidence of an overall romantic project. In contrast to the New Romanticism of Parker and Douglass, that of Harriet Beecher Stowe is advanced chiefly through her sentimental novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Its demeaning stereotypes of black characters align Stowe with the romantic racialism of the other New Romantics; the novel’s “idealization of childhood” and Tom’s “religion of the heart” further reflect New Romanticism (117, 139). In contrast with Tom’s pacifism, George Harris’s recourse to violence as he escapes from slavery reflects Stowe’s vacillation, which she shares with Parker, over the legitimacy of violent antislavery action. Turning to Martin Delany, Kytle effectively wades through the morass of Delany’s shifting antislavery politics and priorities. From his racist expulsion from Harvard Medical College to his commission as the sole black officer in the Union army, Delany is most a New Romantic in his unapologetic martial heroism. Although like Douglass he urges black self-help, Delany scorns Douglass’s confidence in the democratic system. By the 1850s Delany’s earlier call for slaves to take up arms had been replaced...

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. By Adam Wesley Dean . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2015 . x + 230 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $29.95.

<i> An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. </i> By Adam Wesley Dean . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2015 . x + 230 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $29.95.

Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America by Suzanne Cooper Guasco (review)

Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America by Suzanne Cooper Guasco (review)