Bertram Wyatt-Brown Research Articles

Angel of Light: Interpreting John Brown

Angel of Light: Interpreting John Brown William E. Cain (bio) Paul Finkelman, ed. His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. xii 354 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). As the biographer Stephen B. Oates has noted, John Brown is “one of the most controversial figures in American history.” 1 Many have condemned Brown as a madman for committing gruesome murders in the Kansas territory in 1856 and for plotting insurrection at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, while others have honored him as a warrior-saint who sacrificed his life in an inspired but doomed attempt to free America’s slaves. In His Soul Goes Marching On, Paul Finkelman and nine other historians chart “responses” to Brown during the period of his imprisonment and trial and its immediate aftermath, showing vividly the ways in which he clarified, complicated, and heightened the slavery crisis and arguments for and against secession. This is an excellent collection — diverse, wide-ranging, richly detailed — and an important contribution to scholarship on the Civil War period. Part 1 of the book performs the tasks of summary and overview. Finkelman launches it with a cogent preface that surveys Brown’s life and abolitionist activities and comments on the significant work that biographers (e.g., Oswald Garrison Villard, W. E. B. Du Bois, Oates) and scholars (e.g., Benjamin Quarles, Jeffrey Rossbach) have done. Bertram Wyatt-Brown comes next, with a suggestive piece that outlines the themes of the collection and meditates on the “heartening and horrifying” meanings of Brown’s action (p. 11). He scrutinizes Brown’s strange, brooding, obsessive personality and the hold that Brown exercised over northern writers, intellectuals, and reformers. Part 2 focuses on “Northern supporters of Brown.” First, Finkelman describes the “antislavery response” and the process by which Brown was “canonized” as a Transcendentalist and Christian hero (p. 43) — a process to which, Finkelman keenly points out, Brown himself contributed through the nobility he cultivated in his writings, speeches, and conduct in prison and the courtroom. Daniel C. Littlefield follows with a superb study of African Americans’ responses to Brown, whose raid intensified debates about alliances between black and white abolitionists, the meaning of black manhood [End Page 606] and masculinity, and the place that violence should or should not occupy in the campaign against slavery. As Littlefield shows, African Americans were caught in a dilemma; if they resorted to violence, they were portrayed by whites as “aggressive and unprincipled savages,” but if they submitted meekly and relied on moral persuasion alone, they then were seen as weak, acquiescent, incapable of the kind of righteous resistance that white colonists had undertaken during the Revolution when they battled the British (p. 88). Wendy Haman Venet concludes Part 2 by sketching responses to Brown by northern antislavery women, including Harriet Tubman, Lucretia Mott, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Abby Kelley Foster, Susan B. Anthony, and, in particular, Lydia Maria Child, whose correspondence with Virginia governor Henry Wise and Margaretta Mason (wife of Virginia senator James Mason) sold 300,000 copies in pamphlet form and was reprinted in many newspapers. Part 3 consists of three illuminating essays on “Northern and Southern opponents of Brown.” Peter Knupfer studies political alignments in the North and Brown’s jolting effect on them. He treats the problems that Brown’s raid caused for the Republican party as it sought to present itself as a moderate force — opposed to slavery extension but not intent on abolition in the slave states themselves — and as its leaders prepared for the election of 1860. But even more, Knupfer delineates the attempt by northern conservatives, Democrats, and constitutional unionists somehow to meet the threat of national disorder and disintegration that antislavery agitation fostered and that, to them, Brown starkly epitomized. In the next essay, Peter Wallenstein concentrates on southern politics and the quest for sectional unity, as proslavery forces addressed the triple danger they perceived in their four million slaves, nonslaveholding whites, and the Republican party. Brown’s raid, Wallenstein explains, dramatized the evil of “Black Republicanism” and the peril of slave revolts that, it was said, northern whites would kindle but that might...

Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity

By adding consideration of age to that of race, gender, and class, this volume seeks to show how growing older affects literary creativity and psychological development and to examine how individual writing careers begin to change in middle age. The editors have brought together original work by a range of scholars, including Kathleen Woodward and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, the two most influential theorists of ageing; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, the historian at work on a major life-span study of the Percys of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana; and a number of literary scholars from classics, English and modern languages. The contributors note that a culturally constructed decline narrative has dominated literary theory for some time. Yet their research indicates several different patterns of late-life writing, most of which challenge these negative assumptions. Utilising the insights of social psychologists, who have demonstrated that creativity depends upon a fruitful interaction between individual talent and the larger literary world, the contributors show that writers' reactions to ageing are determined partly by cultural attitudes toward gender. This book combines ageing theory with literary analysis. It demonstrates that literature plays an important role in the construction of gerontological theory and that ageing is as important a category in literary analysis as gender, race, class and sexual orientation. Ageing and Gender in Literature bridges the long-standing gap between literature and social science and demonstrates how enriching such an integration can be. Scholars of literature, feminism, gerontology and anyone curious about the development of creativity over the life course, should find this book of interest.

Vietnam and the Southern Imagination (review)

Reviews123 of separate schools coupled with African American control over their own children's education , but few believed that whites would ever approve such an arrangement. At one level, then, Pratt may have missed the successes that inadvertently resulted from the failed policy of school desegregation. In Richmond and in Memphis, white flight meant that these southern cities achieved African American control of the schools and, in many ways, of the cities themselves. Among other things, this also meant that employment for African Americans could be better assured. The failure of a tactic does not mean that a war is lost. The promise of Brown v. Board ofEducation was betrayed, but African Americans were not, and are not, solely dependent on public policy to remedy racism. Vietnam and the Southern Imagination. By Owen W. Gilman Jr. University Press of Mississippi , 1992. xii, 204 pp. Cloth, $35.00. Reviewed by Melton A. McLaurin, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is coeditor of Celia: A Slave and You Wrote My Life: Lyrical Themes in Country Music. The southern imagination, Owen Gilman contends, is alive and well and busily contemplating the tragic experience of Vietnam. Gilman limits his definition of imagination to creative writers, essentially novelists, although he examines several short stories and devotes a chapter to "the southern poet's Vietnam." His thesis is straightforward: Southerners have produced a literature on Vietnam that "has a unique character" because their sense of history provides them with "knowledge carried to the heart." Having established that claim (for which he relies heavily on the work of Allen Tate), Gilman proceeds in subsequent chapters to show how the southern past has shaped the way contemporary southern authors have dealt with Vietnam. Gilman has little trouble convincing the reader of the South's, or at least the southern white male's, devotion to the myth of the warrior. This he accomplishes in his second chapter, primarily through the work ofJames Webb, especially Fields ofFire. A code of personal honor, he contends, leads to the southerner's willingness to accept physical combat as a means of settling differences, both within and among cultures. Gilman is also effective in demonstrating how southern novelists Bobbie Ann Mason and Clyde Edgerton use a sense of the past to interpret the Vietnam experience. While Gilman understands the southern white male's glorification of the warrior , he exhibits little understanding of why this cultural trait developed, relying almost exclusively on Bertram Wyatt-Brown's concept of southern honor as an explanation. The role of slavery and segregation in creating the need for and maintaining the myth of the warrior is never explored. Yet, as John Hope Franklin and other historians have noted, race relations were crucial to the development of a warrior mentality, with its emphasis on physical violence. The frequency with which Nathan Bedford Forrest appears as a symbol of the warrior tradition in the novels critiqued should have alerted Gilman to this linkage. Indeed, one less clearly sympathetic with the tradition (although Gilman notes its flaws) might have argued that white southerners went to Vietnam for the same reasons their forefathers gravitated to the military, to keep peoples of a different color in line. 124Southern Cultures This failure to link the warrior tradition to race relations also limits Gilman's interpretation of Vietnam's impact on black-white relations in the South, a topic to which he devotes a chapter. Gilman notes that southern writers come to different conclusions about the impact of Vietnam on race relations but fails to explain why. Harry Crews, the oldest of the four writers examined in this chapter, is also the most pessimistic, which may reflect his personality or philosophical bent but also may reflect a "knowledge carried to the heart," lacking in younger writers, about the strength of racial prejudice in the segregated South. Gilman is at his best when he explores the way fictional characters embody cultural characteristics of the white, male South. His discussion of Luke Wingo in Pat Conroy's The Prince ofTides, for example, deftly intertwines several major cultural themes: a proclivity for violence, the value of honor, respect for physical courage, and a...

Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920

The Praying South and the Fighting South are two of our most popular images of white southern culture. In Subduing Satan , Ted Ownby details the tensions between these complex--and often opposing--attitudes. re-creation of male recreation is rich and fascinating. He paints the saloon and the street, the cockfighting and dogfighting rings as realms of distinctly male vices, enjoyed lustily by men seeking to escape the sweet virtue of the Southern Christian home.-- Nation A bold new thesis. . . . [Ownby] gives us guideposts in the ongoing search for the meaning of southern history.-- Journal of Southern History I suspect that for many years ahead Ted Ownby's Subduing Satan will serve as the standard guide on how to write religious social history.--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida This is one of the freshest and most interesting books written about the American South in years. By focusing on the cultural conflicts of everyday life, Ownby gets us right to the heart of white culture in the South between Reconstruction and the 1920s.--Edward L. Ayers, University of Virginia

Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (review)

266CIVIL WAR HISTORY the complex and even tragic connections between a code of conduct and human behavior. Clinton's essay, however, along with Brenda Stevenson's discussion of Virginia slave families and Jacqueline Jones's economic analysis of sharecropper families exemplify a growing interest in the African-American women of the nineteenth-century South. Unlike much of the scholarship of the past decade that has exaggerated the strength of the slave family, Stevenson rightly argues that the interference of white masters in the rearing of black children, the devastating impact of miscegenation, and the ever-present threat of breakup through sale left the slave family a "viable but battered institution" (124). Jones too steers a middle course between those historians and economists who would interpret sharecropping either as a logical free market response or as an effort to restore slavery in everything but name. For her, economic coercion and frequent "shifting" of black sharecropping families made for a life of both "resourcefulness and fatalism" (198). In any collection of essays by such talented historians, there is bound to be some stimulating iconoclasm. Rejecting the long-held view that black masters in the old South for the most part merely owned members of their own families, Michael Johnson and James Roark contend that a significant number of these men owned slaves out of self-interest, hoping to further separate themselves from the slave population and securing additional protection for their families' freedom. Eugene Genovese makes a second appearance (this time in a spirited after-dinner speech) to chide historians for ignoring women as participants in the political culture of the old South. Although like many other historians he exaggerates the sectional extremism of these women, he nevertheless makes a persuasive case for taking them seriously. And finally there is plain old novelty. Bertram Wyatt-Brown's wideranging discussion of mental depression and literary talent among the "female Percys" in the nineteenth century combines his usual flair and subtlety with a few unfortunate detours into pretentious psychological speculation and trendy literary theory. Alan Grubb rescues old Southern cookbooks from the collectors and antiquarians. His use of cookbooks as social documents is both creative and stimulating though one suspects unlikely to provide many insights unavailable in other sources. All in all, this essay and the others in this excellent book provide a wonderfully satisfying intellectual feast. George C. Rable Anderson University Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915. By Loren Schweninger. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Pp. 448. $50.00.) This groundbreaking study significantly enhances our knowledge of black property owners in the nineteenth century. Utilizing federal census re- BOOK REVIEWS267 turns, local tax records, newspapers and memoirs, Schweninger vividly portrays a people determined to earn an economic stake in the United States. When Africans first arrived in North America, the author claims, private property ownership was alien to their heritage. They eventually concluded that survival depended not upon communal harmony, but upon individual ingenuity including owning property which, in turn, brought some confidence and self-esteem. Schweninger traces property ownership from 1860 to 1915 among slaves, free blacks, affluent free blacks, and lower and upper South blacks. Even the casual reader knows that a few free blacks owned substantial amounts of land and slaves. More surprising is the degree of property holding among slaves. Many plantation hands managed to acquire small amounts of both money and property which gave a sense of self worth. A few, by conniving their owners, accumulated sizeable estates. In 1860 Anthony Weston, a rice mill builder, held $40,000 of real estate in his free wife's name. Abram Stewart leased five hundred acres from his master, owned more than three hundred head of cattle, and was one of the most successful butchers in Savannah. Before the Civil War a prosperous black was most likely a rural landholder in the lower South. By 1990 the wealthy black more commonly was an urban dweller in the upper South. While free blacks in the Northern states benefitted from the stimulated war economy and decreased competition from whites, Southern black landholders were seriously damaged by the war. For several years after the war those with a...

"A Faith for Freedom": The Political Gospel of Abolition

Historians have long held that roots, character, and conduct of abolition movement grew out of evangelical Protestantism. In his history of movement in 1853, reformer William Goodell wrote that missionary and evangelizing orators . . . were God's instruments for putting into minds of others 'thoughts that burned,' for emancipation of enslaved. Dwight L. Dumond echoed this point almost nine decades later, describing abolition as powerful religious crusade in which from first to last churches were forums, preachers most consistent and powerful advocates, and sin of slavery cardinal thesis of new social philosophy. Following Dumond's lead, Bertram Wyatt-Brown maintained that the abolitionist movement was primarily religious in its origins, its leadership, its language, and its methods of reaching people.' A large body of work has examined relationship between abolition and evangelicalism. One set of studies focuses on doctrinal influence of religion on antislavery, emphasizing importance of a belief in human efficacy and millennialism for life of faith as well as for acts of reform. Believers capable of accepting grace of God could also prepare way of Lord; faithful body that detected and immediately denounced sin, especially sin of

If It Takes All Summer: The Battle of Spotsylvania (review)

262CIVIL WAR HISTORY the rewarding labors of Carol Bleser this remarkable document is available to all who seeka candid but forbidding portrait ofa man and a slave society wrestling with pride, arrogance, and what almost seems to be a death wish. Bertram Wyatt-Brown University of Florida IfIt Takes AUSummer: The Battle ofSpotsylvania. By William D. Matter. (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1988. Pp. xv, 455. $29.95.) Surprisingly, after well over one hundred years and countless thousands of books, there are still major campaigns and battles of the Civil War that have not received comprehensive, scholarly treatment. Instead, these campaigns and battles have been covered anecdotally in reminiscences or superficially as part of larger works. Errors and special pleadings abound in the first category, and in the absence of critical analysis, they often find their way into the second. Until every major campaign and battle is scrutinized in a monograph utilizingall the resources and analytical tools modern scholarship can provide, generalizations on the military aspects ofthe war will remain suspect. Especially is this true of the Overland Campaign of 1864 in Virginia where stereotypes and half-truths prevail in the absence of solid works on all but one ofthe major encounters between Grant and Lee. Clearly the war in Virginia in 1864 differed greatly from that of previous years, but the reasons remain elusive because the monographic foundation upon which to build generalizations remains incomplete. William D. Matter has now contributed significantly to that foundation with the publication of IfIt Takes All Summer: The Battle ofSpotsylvania. Following the bloody but indecisive clash in the Wilderness, U. S. Grant elected to continue offensive operations in a southeasterly direction toward Richmond. Grant's initial objective was Spotsylvania Court House, which he hoped to reach before the Army ofNorthern Virginia could react. Philip Sheridan's incompetent performance and other factors, however, permitted Robert E. Lee to win the race to Spotsylvania. From the point ofinitial contact near the Spindle farm, both armies extended their lines for several miles through the maze of fields, woods, ravines, and small streams. For two weeks Grant tested the Confederate entrenchments, leapfrogging corps over one another as the action shifted from right to left, and then back again. All attempts to gain a decisive breakthrough failed, although a notable penetration occurred on May 12 at the salient known thenceforth as the Bloody Angle. In this action so many bullets were fired at such close quarters for so long that bodies of the fallen were reduced to unrecognizable pulp and an oak tree twenty inches in diameter was felled. But it was all BOOK REVIEWS263 for nothing as Lee's counterattacks boughtenough time for his engineers to construct a new line that eliminated the salient. Finally, after another nine days of indecisive maneuvering and bungled attacks by both sides, Grant again broke contact with Lee's army and headed south once more. Although the horrors of the fight at the Bloody Angle have long been a staple of writings about the Overland Campaign, no comprehensive treatment ofthe Spotsylvania action has been available until the publication of IfIt Takes All Summer. Matter begins his story at the close of the Wilderness battle and carries it forward in great detail until both armies have left Spotsylvania on their way to their next confrontation at North Anna River. Under the best of circumstances it is a complex story because of the broken terrain and the constant shifting of units by both armies from one flank to the other. Matter compounds the complexity by emphasizing the details of daily movement: order of units in column, route of march, distance to be covered, road condition, etc. These homely details provide a much needed corrective to the grand assertions ofthose unfamiliar with the procedures and physical limitations of campaigning. Military historians must understand such parameters or their work will be uninformed and irrelevant. Handled injudiciously, however, such detailed recitation offact may detrimentally affect both writing style and focus. Commendable as it is, Matter's decision to lead the reader through the minutiae of operations has resulted in a writing style often as turgid as the Spotsylvania mud itself. More important, the book's...

The Evolution of Southern Culture

The American South has long been a subject of endless scholarly fascination. Historians and social scientists have endeavored to decipher the enigma of the region and to identify the formative factors that have molded the southern experience.They have searched for a central theme that would explain southern behavior and have debated the extent to which the region was distinctive from the rest of the nation. More recently, historical scholarship has shown a growing interest in the evolution of southern culture and the forces that shaped it.The southern enigma is yet to be fully deciphered, but The Evolution of Southern Culture addresses questions crucial to an understanding of the region's history. The book brings together original, searching essays by nine of the nation's most distinguished scholars: Immanuel Wallerstein, Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eric Foner, Nell Irvin Painter, George M. Frederickson, Joel Williamson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown

The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South

In his Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982), Bertram Wyatt-Brown drew on anthropological theory to explore the origins and nature of the Old South’s culture. Like Genovese, he viewed that culture as premodern in many ways. Unlike Genovese, he argued that the roots of the southern culture lay in a concept of “honor” that originated in the folk cultures of early Europe, rather than in the master-slave relationship itself.

The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln (review)

76civil war history by examining chronological segments in the lives of three planter families—those of William Gaston and the Reverend Drury Lacy of North Carolina and that of Thomas Butler King, a Georgia sea island planter-politician. Space limitations permit only a cursory review of the salient themes which emerge from this complex and highly analytical work. Among other things, Stowe concludes that the planters adhered to and reveled in a hierarchical system of family and social beliefs; that the cultural world of the planters was compartmentalized according to sex and gender, which, more than race or class, defined planter values and actions; that there was a close correlation between personal self-esteem and the collective social order; and finally, that in order to maintain their elite status, the planters were driven toward an ostentatious exhibition of their beliefs—as in the rituals noted above—to such extent as to lead to a fusion of substance with image. As one who practices a more traditional version of the discipline of Clio, perhaps I am not properly appreciative of Professor Stowe's sophisticated interpretive abilities or his broad command of social science literature. Whatever the reason, I see two major problems with this study. First, the author tends to range far beyond the evidence in building his analysis, often attributing deep meaning to what appear to be the most innocuous and unremarkable expressions and actions. Second, by considering southern culture in a vacuum, admittedly eschewing any but the most superficial regional comparisons, he does not demonstrate convincingly that the so-called rituals and the values that they mirrored were uniquely southern. Perhaps the code duello was primarily a southern phenomenon by the nineteenth century, though it is odd that Stowe would choose as his illustration of a duel to the death an 1838 encounter between two congressmen—one from Connecticut and the other from the border state of Kentucky. But how different were southern patterns of courtship from those of the North or even of England? And what was distinctive or remarkable about parents exhorting their adolescent offspring to be diligent, moral, honorable, and achievement-oriented? Whatever its shortcomings, this book will complement the recent work of such scholars as Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Anne Scott, Catherine Clinton, Drew Faust, and Jane Censer and will stimulate thought in the scholarly community. More traditional historians of the slave South will find it less useful than will partisans of the now not-so-new "New Social History." But, as the latter seemingly command the field, their opinion doubtless will carry more weight in the end. William K. Scarborough University of Southern Mississippi The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln. By Mark E. Neely, Jr. and R. Gerald McMurtry. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Pp. xi, 203. $19.95.) book reviews77 This is not a Lincoln book in the traditional sense. The tragic event chronicled has long been an emotionally charged, controversial, and unpleasant episode which relates the destruction of Abraham Lincoln's family a decade after his death. In 1875, after a briefjury trial initiated by her son Robert, Lincoln's widow was judged insane, committed to a "Hospital for the Insane of the Private Class," and denied the control of her own financial resources. It is a book about Mary Todd Lincoln, Robert Todd Lincoln, and a trial which they both endured and which still taints their story. Until the 1980s, only the basic, official court documents stemming from the insanity trial of Mrs. Lincoln were available to historians. Now this new report on the case has appeared, based on previously unavailable personal documents recently given to the authors by the greatgrandson of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. Their combined experience of sixty years in the Lincoln field certainly earned them the golden opportunity to mine the hitherto unknown "MTL Insanity File," as Robert Lincoln himself entitled it. From the beginning of their research, Neely and McMurtry were aware of the controversial nature of their subject. "People seemed to expect us to defend orjustify one protagonist and to denounce another" (p. xii). "Strangely enough, we did not seem to live in this highly charged atmosphere ourselves," an...

The Saints and Sinners of Bertram Wyatt-Brown

The Saints and Sinners of Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Southern Violence Revisited

Edward Ayers has made a distinguished contribution to venerable debate over relationship between southerners and laws. Perhaps even more important, however, his consideration of crime and punishment in nineteenth-century South illuminates central questions concerning character of region in an era of fundamental change. Ayers's findings about rates and types of crime and patterns of conviction and punishment portray a distinctive section transformed by experience of war and Reconstruction. Vengeance and Justice brings new evidence and a refreshing perspective to current disagreements about capitalist or precapitalist nature of Old South, about ties between and slavery, about effects of war and emancipation. Ayers begins his study with a consideration of southern violence that allows him to characterize antebellum southern society more generally. Bertram Wyatt-Brown's recent work on occupies an influential place here, but Ayers has revised these earlier arguments to imbed in a social-structural context that he contends Wyatt-Brown neglected. Slavery, Ayers asserts, generated honor (p. 26), and honor, in turn, produced violence and a sense of limited applicability of law. An overweening concern with opinions of others (p. 19), is in Ayers's view product of economically undiversified, localized, explicitly hierarchical societies where one standard of worth can reign (p. 26). Slavery insulated Old South from market development and cultural diversity associated with capitalism and its system of values. In North and other more developed areas, came to be supplanted by dignity, an internal rather than external gauge of self-worth -the conviction that each individual at birth possessed an intrinsic value . .. theoretically equal to that of every other person (p. 19). The importance of self-control, discipline, and autonomy within wider notion of dignity indicates its close connection to the transformations

The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. By Rhys Isaac (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for The Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982. xxxii + 451 pp. $29.50) and Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. xxi + 597 pp. $29.95)

The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. By Rhys Isaac (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for The Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982. xxxii + 451 pp. $29.50) and Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. xxi + 597 pp. $29.95)

Charles B. Strozier. <italic>Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings</italic>. New York: Basic Books. 1982. Pp. xxiii, 271. $17.50

Charles B. Strozier. Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings. New York: Basic Books. 1982. Pp. xxiii, 271. $17.50 Get access Strozier Charles B.. Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings. New York: Basic Books. 1982. Pp. xxiii, 271. $17.50. Bertram Wyatt-Brown Bertram Wyatt-Brown Case Western Reserve University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 88, Issue 4, October 1983, Page 1070, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/88.4.1070 Published: 01 October 1983

"Knives in Their Heads": Passionate Self-Analysis and the Search for Identity in American Abolitionism

Robert H. Abzug. Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld & the Dilemma of Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. 370 + xi pp. Lawrence J. Friedman. Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.344 + xi pp. Lewis Perry. Childhood, Marriage, and Reform: Henry Clarke Wright 1797-1870. Chicago:' The University of Chicago Press, 1980.359 + xiv pp. Peter F. Walker. Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth Century American Abolition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. 387 + xxii pp. Between the early 1960s and mid-1970s the major scholarly break-throughs in the study of American abolitionism occurred in the study of ideology. The work of John L. Thomas, Aileen Kraditor, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Perry, James B. Stewart and Ronald Walters (among others) was critically important in analyzing the complexities of abolitionist thought which called for immediate repentance from the sin of slavery and the elevation of blacks "to an intellectual, moral and political equality with the whites."1 Abolition- ism, which emerged from the evangelical revivals of the 1820s (although most evangelical Protestants did not embrace abolitionism), radicalized many traditional Protestant ideas or doctrines in promoting the cause of the slave— e.g., millennialism, the sovereignty of God and the moral government of God. In essence, the sin of slavery was not merely the brutalization of human beings, but that enslavement prevented blacks from being "free moral agents." As the constitution of the Lane Seminary Anti-Slavery Society phrased it, God created the black man as "a moral agent, the keeper of his own happiness, the executive of his own powers, the accountable arbiter of his own choice." Slavery "stifle[d] the moral affections, repress[ed] the innate longings of the spirit, paralyze[d] conscience, turn[ed] hope to despair, and kill[ed] the soul." It also destroyed the family, aroused feelings of "despera- tion and revenge, provoke[d] insurrection, and peril[ed] public safety." It "foment[ed] division and alienation in our public councils, and put in jeopardy the existence of the union"; and it paralyzed "all missionary effort" and "expos[ed] the nation to the judgment of God" (Abzug, pp. 92-93).

Confidence and Pertinacity in Evangelical Abolitionism: Lewis Tappan's Circle

IN HIS 1933 STUDY, The Antislavery Impulse, GILBERT HOBBS Barnes demonstrated for first time that not all antebellum American abolitionists were radical Garrisonians. There were also conservative abolitionists like Theodore Weld and James Birney who drew upon reformist aspects of Finneyite Great Revivals of 1820s and 1830s. Their aim was not social revolution; instead, they simply sought to make nation's religious and political institutions unambiguously antislavery. In more recent years, scholars have noted that all conservative abolitionists were not same. Although all conservatives were sympathetic with Liberty Party during 1840s, a number remained more concerned with reforming evangelical Protestant denominations than building an antislavery political movement. Bertram Wyatt-Brown's 1969 biography, Lewis Tappan and Evangelical War against Slavery, has been most sophisticated effort at characterizing these evangelical church-oriented conservatives. Wyatt-Brown's achievements were two-fold. Differing with Barnes, he demonstrated that evangelical conservatives did not restrict their activities to Midwest; various groups also operated throughout Northeast. Second, Wyatt-Brown showed how the evangelicals of [Lewis] Tappan's immediate circle formed most influential group of church-centered abolitionists through their dominant role on American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, American Missionary Association, and New York City Abolition Society, as well as through their funding of Oberlin and Oneida Institutes-the principal training grounds for evangelical antislavery clergy. But because Wyatt-Brown's focus was biographical, he was unable to provide detailed analysis of values and interactions within Tappan's immediate circle.

Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies ed. with an intr. by John W. Blassingame

Book Review| July 01 1978 Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies ed. with an intr. by John W. Blassingame Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Edited with an Introduction by Blassingame, John W.. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Pp. lxv, 777. Illustrated. Index. $37.50 cloth; $9.95, paper. Bertram Wyatt-Brown Bertram Wyatt-Brown Shelby Cullom Davis Center, Princeton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1978) 77 (3): 385–386. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-77-3-385 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bertram Wyatt-Brown; Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies ed. with an intr. by John W. Blassingame. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 1978; 77 (3): 385–386. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-77-3-385 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1978 by Duke University Press1978 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Merton L. Dillon. <italic>The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority</italic>. (Minorities of American History.) DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 1974. Pp. xiii, 298

Merton L. Dillon. The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority. (Minorities of American History.) DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 1974. Pp. xiii, 298 Dillon Merton L.. The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority. (Minorities of American History.) DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 1974. Pp. xiii, 298. Bertram Wyatt-Brown Bertram Wyatt-Brown Case Western Reserve University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 81, Issue 3, June 1976, Page 662, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/81.3.662 Published: 01 June 1976

Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease. <italic>They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, 1830–1861</italic>. (Studies in American Negro Life.) New York: Atheneum. 1974. Pp. xi, 331. $10.00 and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin. <italic>The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke</italic>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1974. Pp. xv, 265. $11.95

Journal Article Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease. They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, 1830–1861. (Studies in American Negro Life.) New York: Atheneum. 1974. Pp. xi, 331. $10.00 and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin. The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1974. Pp. xv, 265. $11.95 Get access Pease Jane H. and Pease William H.. They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, 1830–1861. (Studies in American Negro Life.) New York: Atheneum. 1974. Pp. xi, 331. $10.00. Lumpkin Katharine Du Pre. The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1974. Pp. xv, 265. $11.95. Bertram Wyatt-Brown Bertram Wyatt-Brown Case Western Reserve University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 81, Issue 2, April 1976, Pages 446–447, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/81.2.446-a Published: 01 April 1976

The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States (review)

282BOOK REVIEWS do with antagonisms between subsistence folk and commercialfarming slaveholders. Perceptively Bruce dissects the choral verses of revival hymns, finding them curiously barren of imagery. He attributes this failing to a lack of political focus for agrarian resentment , but without an appreciation for the ethnic and economic character of a hog culture, so to speak, his explanation is not at all convincing. Using anthropological studies only in regard to campmeeting conversions and liturgies, he missed a rich opportunity. Professor Bruce's work is another reminder of the deplorable state of our understanding of the rural southern past. Historians have been too slow in utilizing recent work in rural sociology, too glib in offering up the indignant sop of class "oppression," too lazy in passing over vast archival resources. Like the "plain folk" he seeks to honor, Bruce is a victim of scholarly sloppiness in the field. Endowed with a keen analytical mind, the author needs only encouragement and better secondary studies upon which to build interpretation in order to help in the reconstruction of how people once lived in the non-slaveholding South. Bertram Wyatt-Brown Case Western Reserve University The Secession Movement in the Middle Atìantic States. By William C. Wright. (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973. Pp. 274. $15.00.) This regional study of the secession movement in five Middle Atlantic states surveys political opinions from the 1860 presidential election through the immediate post-Fort Sumter weeks. William C. Wright documents, state by state, the secessionist opinions of governors , senators, representatives, political parties and conventions, churches, newspapers and important cities and private figures. He describes as secessionists all those who wanted to join the Confederacy , those who desired a central confederacy, and those who preferred to let the South go in peace. The latter was by far the most popular because of the fear that a war would be fought on their ground. Wright finds that Maryland had the strongest secessionist movement , Delaware played a minor role, New Jersey favored a central confederacy, Pennsylvania had the weakest secessionist movement, and New York was dominated in its pro-southern opinion by New York City. He concludes that the Democratic party in all five states supported the secessionist movement and that it centered in those areas linked to the South by economic, cultural and social ties. He concludes, too, that the movement failed primarily because of inadequate leadership and the lack of a vehicle for legal expression of BOOK REVIEWS283 opinion. Support for all levels of Middle Atlantic secessionist sympathy ended with Fort Sumter. Wright is most believable when outlining the reasons for support of peaceable secession and in documenting the abrupt end of it after Fort Sumter. He is the least convincing when asserting the actual amount of support for secession. Too often facts are presented that lead to no conclusion, but on this point the conclusion does not follow from the facts, despite the established number of leading Democrats who supported peaceable secession. Instead of confronting the conceptual problem of basing "populace" support on the existence of elitist opinion, Wright ignores it, or more specifically, confuses it because he is at once confident of the amount of his secessionist support and still willing to admit that it is impossible to determine. Generally it is a case of unwarranted extrapolation. "Secessionist" is also not properly distinguished from "secessionist sympathy," in that it is too broadly defined to include not only those anxious to secede but those willing to allow peaceable secession. Using an array of both primary and secondary sources, Wright pulls together an impressive amount of documentation. At the same time his evidence is too often conceptually unevaluated. The book too frequently becomes a compendium of undigested facts that turn up as unintroduced and unidentified quotations. Indeed, an uncommonly large number of pages are comprised of five indented quotations that disguise rather than elucidate. The footnotes are at the end. Fred Nicklason University of Maryland John Elliot Cairnes and the American Civü War. A Study in AngloAmerican Rehtions. By Adelaide Weinberg. (London: Kingswood Press, 1973. Pp. 224. $6.50.) Probably no book of its time exercised greater influence in shaping British public opinion on...