Abolitionist Cause Research Articles

Die Sklavenbefreiung in Brasilien, eine soziale Frage für die Kirche? Die Katholische Kirche und das Ende der Sklaverei in der Kaffeeprovinz São Paulo, 1871-1888

This study is Katharina Bosl’s doctoral dissertation as submitted to the Catholic University Eichstätt in 1997. It asks “whether and how Catholicism influenced the debate over the abolition of slavery [in Brazil] and what position the church took vis-à-vis its own historical involvement with slavery” (p. 16). The church’s adoption of social causes since Vatican II inspired Bosl, who characterizes her approach as “church history motivated by liberation theology” (p. 23). The study is an historical search for a liberating church in the decades before the abolition of slavery in 1888.The subject proves elusive: Bosl concludes that the Brazilian church played at best a minor role in the abolitionist movement. Clerics and religious orders owned slaves, the church defended slavery (despite occasional condemnations of slave abuse), and church leaders lent no support to the abolitionist movement. Having failed to find the liberating church, Bosl struggles to find a clear analytical focus. The second chapter, for example, retells the familiar history of slavery in Brazil in the first half of the nineteenth century and then jumps to an entirely separate survey of the state of the church in São Paulo around 1850. The fifth chapter offers interesting discussions of the role of caifazes (groups encouraging slave flight from plantations) and black brotherhoods in the abolitionist struggle in São Paulo. Although Bosl infers an influence of Catholic religion on these movements, she acknowledges that the evidence is inconclusive and then oddly proceeds to document religious influence for African cults and Islam. The study is strongest when it firmly establishes church agency in the development of African slavery in Brazil. The opening chapter surveys the church’s involvement and response to slavery during colonial times and the fourth places the abolition of slavery in convents in 1871 within a trajectory of the religious orders’ general economic decline.The two remaining chapters go to the core problem: the politics of the Brazilian church hierarchy. Bosl never anchors the discussion in the context of romanized church doctrine, however, and thus misses the opportunity to deepen the analysis. The short third chapter on the lack of clerical involvement in the liberation of slave children in 1871 contrasts the positions of bishops and prominent abolitionists on the church’s role in the genesis of the free-womb law. Bosl refers to the church’s conflict with Brazilian liberals over freemasonry and ultramontane reorientation, locates the question of abolition between these ideological fronts, and concludes that “[a]n objective recognition and a real interest in the situation of the enslaved population did not take place under these circumstances” (p. 335). This appears apologetic in light of her evidence, in particular Joaquim Nabuco’s disgust at the church’s decision to prioritize economic interest and self-preservation over humanistic ideals. Bosl touches upon the importance of neo-Thomism and identifies the “collision of interests between the right to freedom and the right to property (also in people) as a contradiction that is difficult for our modern sensibilities to resolve” (p. 156). She never attempts to solve this historical puzzle, however, despite the paramount importance of property doctrine in explaining the hierarchy’s silence. The sixth chapter covers the bishops’ late, opportunistic conversion to the abolitionist cause, and Bosl highlights the church’s failure to develop a “social consciousness” for the fate of the Afro-Brazilians after abolition. To assess the kind and extent of social consciousness one could expect the Catholic Church to display in the 1880s, it would have been indispensable to discuss the Roman context. The Vatican first addressed social questions in Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“On the Condition of Labor”), the fruit of a decade of debate among Catholic social reformers. The encyclical described the “yoke of the laboring poor as little better than that of slavery itself” (Art. 3), suggesting that Vatican politics played a role in the Brazilian hierarchy’s sudden shift on abolition.Bosl’s study provides a good introduction to the history and historiography of slavery in Brazil for German readers, although those familiar with Brazilian and U.S. scholarship will find her bibliography dated. The parts on the history of Catholic institutions in São Paulo are interesting, as is the conclusion that the church played hardly any role in the abolitionist movement. Still, to fully answer the title question would have required more context. Bosl’s study also illustrates why inspiration by liberation theology, common in recent historiography, is a problematic starting point for understanding the earlier history of the Catholic Church in Latin America. Portraying its history from 1850 to 1960 as a mere prelude to Vatican II downplays the romanized church’s deep-rooted social and political conservatism, often in alliance with the extreme political right, and obscures the origins of liberation theology.

"He Made Us Laugh Some": Frederick Douglass's Humor

Among Frederick Douglass's formidable skills critic of slavery and racial prejudice, he was widely remembered during the nineteenth century for being able to make his audiences laugh. Toward the end of Douglass's final autobiography, The Life and Times, he remarks that have been greatly helped to bear up under unfriendly conditions, too, by a constitutional tendency to see the funny side of things (470). In support of his claim, he tells a story of riding a crowded night train through New York State. As one of the few passengers who had a whole bench seat to himself, he covered his head and went to sleep. When a well-dressed white man asked him to slide over, Douglass sat up and said, 'Don't sit down here, my friend, I am a nigger.' 'I don't care who the devil you are,' the man responded. 'I mean to sit with you,' to which Douglass replied, 'Well, if it must be so, I can stand it if you can' (470). Douglass concludes the anecdote by noting that the two men then struck up an agreeable conversation for the rest of the trip. As is typical of Douglass's rhetoric, the story turns on several ironies, not the least of which is his preference to be treated like an equal citizen despite the fact it might bring temporary discomfort. The story is important, too, because of the egalitarian turn of Douglass's final remark. His grumbling consent to the white man's request reverses the roles of a painfully familiar racial tableau in which the person of color requests a seat. Most importantly, however, the scene is characteristic of the dialectic between violence and humor that animates much of Douglass's rhetoric: The affectionate and benevolent term my friend hardly belongs in the same sentence with the word nigger. This contrast between pain and pleasure characterizes many Douglass anecdotes. At his best, Douglass could win his enemies' admiration by making them smile with him. But as Spike Lee has recently illustrated in his thoughtful film Bamboozled, making white folks laugh in this way has always had its dangers. As a newspaper editor, Douglass was well-known for his dislike of minstrel humor, and when he joked in public, he knew that he might be measured against those standards. By exploiting his audiences' likely prejudices, however, Douglass used humor to transform himself from a social pariah into an equal. In other words, while Douglass attempted to separate himself from the cliches of plantation comedy, he often deliberately invoked those genres of bigoted humor in the service of the abolitionist cause. Because modern literary critics have generally represented Douglass with earnest passages taken from his Narrative, there has been a tendency to cast him in the singular role of righteous anti-slavery crusader. Naturally, Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison were strongly invested in people's appreciation of the Narrative on these terms. At the same time, however, many recent criticisms of Douglass, ranging from allegations of racial sedition to sexism, have their origin in close readings of the Narrative, a document that represents only a small fragment of Douglass's literary career. Douglass's use of humor turns many recent criticisms upside down and reveals a much more complicated figure than current descriptions of him as a representative man of Jacksonian individualism. Douglass's humor is evident throughout his 1845 Narrative, although this text is seldom noted for its comic moments. Until the very end of the Narrative, Douglass usually employs a plaintive voice, consistent with the character who gives the desperate soliloquy to the ships on the Chesapeake Bay. As is commonly known, the Narrative is a well-crafted series of dramatic narratives that Douglass developed on stage during his four years' work as a paid agent for William Lloyd Garrison's Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. And while many of the powerful scenes he used in his Narrative came directly from his stage repertoire, on the page, he elected to modulate his charismatic stage persona and appeal to readers as a supplicant rather than as an equal. …

English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader

On March 13, 1711, an article appeared in The Spectator about Thomas Inkle, a young and aspiring English trader cast ashore in the Americas, who is saved from violent death by Yarico, a beautiful Indian maiden. When he and Yarico become lovers, Inkle promises to clothe her in silks and transport her in carriages when he returns with her to England. Some months later, they are picked up after Yarico succeeds in signaling a passing English ship. But upon reaching Barbados, Inkle immediately sells Yarico into slavery-raising the price he demands when he learns that Yarico is pregnant with his child. Based on a real life account in Richard Ligon's History of Barbados published half a century earlier, the Spectator story caused a sensation as debate intensified over slavery in the British colonies-and it would be told and retold for decades as perhaps the most compelling folk epic of its age. English Trader, Indian Maid, Frank Felsenstein has assembled the main English versions of this once-famous story, including a newly rediscovered poetical epistle by Charles James Fox, one of the leading parliamentary promoters of the cause of abolition. As well as George Colman the Younger's still vibrant comic opera-considered by some the earliest English social problem play-the book contains tantalizing retellings from the Caribbean and from America, where the story has close affinities with the tale of Pocahontas. Also present are notable works by English women writers, such as Frances Seymour and Anna Maria Porter, and freshly attributed English renditions by Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire thresher poet, and by Peter Pindar (John Wolcot). Felsenstein also suggests an intriguing link with William Wordsworth, who may have had the story in mind while composing his Lyrical Ballads. This edition restores the story of Inkle and Yarico to its rightful place as a focal narrative in cultural and historical debate of issues of gender, race, and colonialism. In Inkle and Yarico we have that rare entity, a perfect example of an intertextual discourse that reflects so much of the diversity and contradictions of the age that fostered it ...Its diverse handling of issues of gender and race makes it a lively and highly topical discussion piece in the classroom. Equally, given the regrettable (and actually surprising) shortfall of prominent eighteenth-century literary texts that treat of the subject of slavery, Inkle and Yarico fills a highly significant gap.-from the Introduction [p.43]

Not the Full Story: Representing Ruth Ellis

I must close now but remember I am quite happy with the verdict, but not the way the story was told, there is so much that people don't know about. Ruth Ellis, on the eve of her execution (Hancock 2) The Subject in Question Although she was briefly an international celebrity, Ruth Ellis is not immediately memorable to people nowadays. She is best recognized by readers of "true crime" magazines, where she often features as the enduring pulp-fiction stereotype of tough blonde floozy--just the kind who would kill a playboy lover in a fit of jealous rage. The real twenty-eight year old murderess named Ruth Ellis, who was hanged in Holloway Prison, London, on July 13, 1955, remains historically significant because the circumstances of her case contributed the last telling example to a gathering nationwide concern about the justice of capital punishment. Lingering questions about her criminal [End Page 1] actions, the handling of her trial, and her execution helped to bring about the greatest change in criminal law the British judicial system had hitherto countenanced--the abolition of the mandatory death penalty for murder. The woman in question died in 1955. Capital punishment for most crimes of murder was abolished a decade later. Mike Newell's biopic of Ruth Ellis, Dance with a Stranger, titled after one of her favorite Peggy Lee songs, screened on both sides of the Atlantic in 1985 1 --again a critical time for the abolitionist cause in Britain, with arguments for the death penalty once more a hot political issue. The film's creators drew on interviews, Old Bailey trial transcripts, and other details which Ellis's original biographer, Robert Hancock, had first presented at length in 1963. Documentation of the film project's evolution suggests that Newell and his team understood their work's potential for carrying a powerful social message, even without placing overt emphasis on Ruth Ellis's trial and execution. Dance with a Stranger, therefore, concentrated on the last two years of her life, underpinning a lingering popular image of Ellis as a "good-time girl," but with a story closer to the sad truth of the matter--that she never had a good time. This article discusses how Ellis's biography continued to be constructed socially over the three decades after her death, and thus engages with a fundamental issue of biopic making--how to tell a story. In the case of Ruth Ellis, there are two films to consider: Dance with a Stranger, and the less well-known 1956 "quasi-biopic" Yield to the Night, directed by J. Lee Thompson. Both have contributed to an ongoing social representation of the subject "Ruth Ellis" in public memory. These films may be thought of as intertexts in that they both tell significant parts of what is generally (if erroneously) recognized as the Ellis "story." Both are tightly focused narratives, reducing the potential life span of a full biographical study to the last significant part of their subjects' lives--just over a year in one case, and under three weeks in the other. Through their chosen narrative, stylistic, and casting strategies, the films give a singular generic shape to their main characters--two socially deviant women in the same specific historical and social environment--while developing a discourse to critique simplistic moral readings of the transgressors who are their main subjects. In this way, as I shall argue, both films deliberately deny the viewer the easy closure that would comfortably fix Ruth Ellis's "story." Ultimately, despite each film's attempt to be truthful in its own way, neither the fictionalized reworking of the punishment nor the fictionalized biopic tells a "full" story of Ruth Ellis. [End Page 2] Finally, we should also note that the actresses chosen to represent the main character in each film immediately took on an intertextual significance of another kind in relation to Ruth Ellis. At least in one instance, Ellis's life pattern was closely mirrored by Diana Dors...

Harriet Jacobs and the Language of Autobiography

Harriet Jacobs is in many ways a reluctant autobiographer. In the eyes of nineteenth-century southerners, she is rightfully a slave, and therefore has no claim to her own identity or to "a life." By northern standards, she is a fallen woman, whose life story is best kept a secret. And even among other slave narratives, her story will prove to be unusual. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ([1861] 1987) is not just the story of a slave's escape to freedom; it is complicated by her ties to the children whose very existence is proof of her sexual transgressions. Telling the story of her escape necessarily involves explaining her sexual history, and, in fact, it is precisely Jacobs's experience of sexual oppression that her abolitionist friends want her to reveal. Autobiography is concerned with making the private life public; as Jerome Bruner notes, "one's reflections on both one's self and one's world cannot be one's own alone: you and your version of your world must be public, recognizable enough to be negotiable in the 'conversation of lives'" (1993, 43). But Jacobs does not want to make her private life recognizable as part of a public conversation—"it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history" ([1861] 1987, 335)—because she cannot write her life without including her sexual experience. She writes her story not as a way of attracting attention to her own life, but as a political statement, a way of "arous[ing] the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South" (335). Written for the specific cause of abolition, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is more a political work than an autobiography, and thus Jacobs must negotiate the tension between her private life and her political purpose. While the cause of abolition is acceptable to her audience, the story of sexual sin is not. Writing directly to an audience of white, northern women, Jacobs must find a way of establishing a sisterhood of all women who will fight for abolition, without sacrificing her own life and self-respect to her cause.

Friends in York: The Dynamics of Quaker Revival, 1780-1860 (review)

66Quaker History Societies" includes a historiographical essay by Nancy Hewitt and discussions of the New York, Boston and Philadelphia Female Antislavery societies by Amy Swerdlow, Debra Hansen and Jean Soderlund, respectively . Those looking for the inclusion of further information about the Buffum sisters will be disappointed, because only Rebecca is mentioned, and that only briefly, in the essay on the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. The essays highlight the social and political tensions these women faced as they attempted to organize in a culture of "separate spheres" and respond with moral integrity to the unpopular cause of abolition. The second part investigates "Black Women in the Political Culture of Reform." Sources focus on the same three cities: Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Emma Lapsansky and Julie Winch concentrate on Philadelphia , which had the most active black population, while Anne Boylan examines antislavery activity in New York and Boston. The essays reflect on the halting, but daring, attempts at biracial organizing and the emergence ofAfrican-American self-help organizations. The final essay in this part, written by Nell Irvin Painter, rethinks the indomitable Sojourner Truth, in light of the highly charged intersection ofrace and gender. Thè final part explores "Strategies and Tactics." Strategies immediately raise questions ofanalysis ofpower, resource allocation, and participation. Fund raising fairs, writing pamphlets and newspaper articles, circulating petitions, even speaking before "promiscuous" (mixed-gender) audiences are some ofthe many tactics examined in these essays. Ofparticular interest to some will be the essay by Margaret Bacon "By Moral Force Alone: The Antislavery Women and Nonresistance." The section concludes with Kathryn Kish Sklar's essay comparing American and British women at the World Anti-slavery Convention held in London, 1840. Together these books offer some fascinating insights into the nineteenth century world offemale activists. Racial slavery tears at the fabric oftheir society, and in challenging slavery, they learn a great deal about the political and economic operations of their country, and begin pushing the borders of their own commitment to gender and racial equality. Their struggle to live "virtuous lives" in the midst of socially sanctioned injustices may challenge some readers to reflect on contemporary parallels. Earlham CollegeCarol Hunter Friends in York: The Dynamics of Quaker Revival, 1780-1860. By Sheila Wright. Keele: Keele University Press, 1995. 253 pp. Maps, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. £35. Membership ofYork Monthly Meeting grew in these eighty years even Book Reviews67 though the membership ofLondon Yearly Meeting as a whole decreased during thisperiod, andWrightprovides us with a careful analysis ofvarious statistics, plus helpful and reasonable explanations of what the figures represent as well as an interesting overall picture of York Quakers in this era. The author indicates that the contributions of strong, independent women such as Esther Tuke, Priscilla Tuke, Katherine Jepson, and Sarah Rowntree was as important in explaining the strength ofthe Meeting as the contributions of male members such as Henry Tuke, Lindley Murray, James Backhouse, and Joseph Rowntree. She provides many statistical tables such as figures on the size ofestates of deceased Friends, varying from £60,000 for the nurseryman Thomas Backhouse to £1,000 for the bookseller Nathaniel Bell, and a similar amount for John Tuke, land-surveyor. One third of the wills listed were worth £1,000 or more. She compiles figures on the age ofboth men and women at the time ofmarriage, the number ofyears between marrying and the first birth, statistics about disownment, of which marrying out of Meeting was the most common. She also lists allmembers who attendedthe business meetings ofYork Monthly Meeting, and provides the occupation of each member. As Friends turned from Quietism to Evangelicalism they became involved in many philanthropic activities in York, oftenjoining Evangelicals in other denominations, instead of maintaining a distinct existence as before. Wright lists 33 of these bodies, not counting the Retreat, the Quaker-controlled mental hospital. She also listed seven schools which Friends supported, including three started by their own members. They provided leadership in some of these concerns, especially in the antislavery movement, which they supported even before the evangelical movement embraced it. John Woolman, an active leader in this movement, was also a leading exemplar ofQuietism. He came to minister in York in...

Brothers and Keepers and the Tradition of the Slave Narrative

Beneath the riveting and empowering stories of successful flights to freedom told in the slave narratives that are foundational for the African American literary tradition are often discouraging stories of the silencing and effacement of their slave protagonists, under the well-intentioned guiding hands of ghost writers, editors, and supporters. In John Sekora's phrase, the narratives often turn out to be carefully wrapped in envelopes. John Edgar Wideman's first nonfiction book, Brothers and Keepers, shares many of the themes established by the founding genre of the African American literary tradition, the slave narrative--above all, its twin concerns with liberty and literacy. But while Brothers and Keepers deeply and variously parallels the thematic emphases of the slave narratives, Wideman, whether or not in direct response, in effect revises some of that genre's most salient conventions and its formative assumptions about black authorship, validation, voice, and narrative structure. (1) He does so by revising the compositional practices by which the slave narratives were most often constructed, practices which tended to muffle the protagonists' individual voices through the use of stylistic and structural features imposed by their sponsors' beliefs about African Americans and about the white readers' expectations, and their all-encompassing commitment to the abolitionist cause. The changes Wideman rings on the genre's conventions allow him to give a larger portion of narrative and compositional control to his book's second protagonist, his otherwise largely disenfranchised brother Robert. Considering Brothers and Keepers in relation to the slave narratives thus suggestively deepens its resonances while illuminating both the contemporary and the earlier works. His essay on Charles Chesnutt reveals Wideman's particular interest in the oral qualities of the African American narrative tradition. However, I will concentrate here on the relationship between Brothers and Keepers and the written life stories of slaves. Writing itself is a central issue for both Wideman and the slaves, and the written narratives explicitly foreground issues of emphasis, structure, verification, truthfulness, and collaboration that may only be inferable from the oral records, but that Wideman engages passionately and creatively throughout his book. Brothers and Keepers is the story of two brothers from the Homewood section of Pittsburgh. John, a Rhodes Scholar and novelist, was, when he wrote it, an English professor at the University of Wyoming. Robert, younger by about ten years, having tried, largely unsuccessfully, to establish himself on the street as a major drug dealer, had served several years of a life sentence for murder, the result of a holdup that went out of control. The book incorporates both brothers' perspectives and voices, as it tries to answer the questions compelled by their different lives, and to reconnect them to each other. In this effort, the book both uses strategies and devices familiar to readers of slave narratives, and addresses, directly or obliquely, the questions those conventional practices raise. Brothers and Keepers echoes and modifies several major characteristics of the written narratives of slaves: the presence of an editor, sponsor, or ghostwriter mediating between the narrator/protagonist and the audience, and the tendency to explain the process of writing or recording the story; the concern with truthfulness, and the incorporation of various forms of documentation and validation to guarantee it; the consequent presence of diverse genres of discourse; the presence of multiple voices (if only as a result of generic diversity, and notwithstanding the general paucity of genuinely oral elements); the incorporation of others' stories, so that the individual's story becomes representative; an explicit moral purposefulness, especially but not only in those narratives that predate the abolition of slavery; (2) and the themes of flight and literacy, of entrapment (both internal and by an external, dehumanizing system), of masking, of the lonely search for home, of the significance of names, of the need to establish a sense of self apart from others' expectations, and of the importance of family and family history. …

Language in Slavery: Frederick Douglass's Narrative

For historians who use slave narratives to document the immediate physical and social facts of slave life, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself offers a frustratingly low yield. Beside Solomon Northup's detailed account of living quarters, diet, work life, holidays, and family relations, Douglass's Narrative must seem spare, incomplete, even misleading in its portrayal of the slave experience—an incendiary polemic written more to fuel the abolitionist cause than to convey the nature of the slave experience. To read the Narrative from this point of view, however, is to misapprehend how Douglass's text treats slavery and to be needlessly disappointed. Unlike Northup, Douglass focuses on the linguistic significance of bondage: He tersely portrays masters and slaves almost solely in terms of their linguistic acts because, for him, the reality of slavery is a profoundly rhetorical one. He charts his own relentless progress to freedom as the acquisition of an ever deeper understanding of language use in a slave economy, and the realization of his own freedom at the Nantucket antislavery convention is preeminently a linguistic event. Douglass's perspective is an important one, for as sociolinguists have discovered, “peoples do not all everywhere use language to the same degree, in the same situations, or for the same things. … Languages, like other cultural traits, will be found to vary in the degree and nature of their integration into the societies and cultures in which they occur.” Douglass was acutely sensitive to the linguistic system of slave society, of the ways in which language was used—and withheld—by one human being to enslave another.

The Complexities of Factionalism: Letters of Elizur Wright, Jr. on the Abolitionist Schism, 1837-1840

THE COMPLEXITIES OF FACTIONALISM: LETTERS OF ELIZUR WRIGHT, JR. ON THE ABOLITIONIST SCHISM, 1837-1840 Edited by Richard O. Curry Lawrence B. Goodheart Antislavery unity was shattered by the abolitionist schism of 1837 to 1840. That Garrison's views on politics, women's rights, perfectionism and nonresistance anarchism generated bitter controversy is well known. What historians have not fully appreciated is that anti-Garrisonian abolitionistswere so divided in outlook thatby 1839 the splitin abolitionist ranks was no longer dichotomous, but a tripartite fissure consisting of the Garrisonians and two antagonistic anti-Garrisonian factions: the religiouslyorthodox evangelical abolitionists and the third party political abolitionists.1 The letters of Elizur Wright, Jr. (published below) are critically important in bringingclarityto thecomplexities offaction- ' It is not valid to argue that historians such as Gilbert H. Barnes, Dwight L. Dumond, Louis Filler, John L. Thomas, Walter M. Merrill, Aileen S. Kraditor, Lewis Perry, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and James B. Stewart fail to recognize the existence of three abolitionist factions in their highly disparate analyses of the abolitionist schism. It cannot be too strongly stated, however, that their views on factionalism are characterized by such a strong Garrisonian or anti-Garrisonian emphasis that their interpretations do not fully explain the origins, nature, and significance ofthe tripartitesplit. See Barnes, TheAntislavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (1933; reprint ed.. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), 161-70; Dumond,Antishvery: The CrusadeforFreedom inAmerica (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1961), 282-97; Filler, The Crusade against Slavery, 1830-1860 (New York: Harper and Row, I960), 130-36, 150-53; Merrill, Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of William Lloyd Carrison (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), 141-60; Thomas, The Liberator. William Lloyd Garrison, A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1963), 256-93; Kraditor, "An Interpretation of Factionalism in the Abolitionist Movement," in Richard O. Curry, ed., The Abolitionists (Hinsdale, 111.: Dryden Press, 1973), 76-83, and Means andEndsin AmericanAbolitionism: Garrison andHis Critics on Strategy and Tactics , 1834-1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1967), passim; Wyatt-Brown, "William LloydGarrison and Anti-Slavery Unity: A Reappraisal," Civil WarHistory 13 (1967): 5-24, and Lewis TappanandtheEvangelicalWaragainst Sioueri/ (Cleveland: CaseWestern Reserve Univ. Press, 1969), 185-204; Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antishvery Thought (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), 158-87; Stewart, "The Aims and Impact of Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1840-1860," Civil War History 15 (1969): 197-209; "Peaceful Hopes and Violent Experience: The Evolution ofReformingand Radical Abolitionism, 1831-1837," Civil War History 17 (1971): 293-309; and Holy Warriors: The AbolitionistsandAmerican Slavery (New York: Hill and Wane, 1976), 89-96. Ronald C. Walters's TheAntislaveryAppeal: AmericanAbolitionism after1830 (Baltimore: Johns 246civil war history alism precisely because they delineatein unmistakable terms the origins, evolution, and significance of three distinct world views which not only made compromise among abolitionists impossible but the creation of three warring factions inevitable.2 The origins of this tripartite fissure date back to the summer of 1837 when a succession of clerical appeals attacked Garrison's views. Prominent antislavery ministers in Massachusetts strongly impugned Garrison 's recent espousal of nonresistant anarchism, a radical pietism that rejected the use of physical force in human relationships, stressed the potential for individual spiritual perfection on earth, and pledged sole allegiance to the moral government of God. His "breach" ofsexual decorum in encouraging Sarah and Angelina Grimké to give antislavery lectures to mixed audiences of men and women during the summer of 1837 further alarmed the socially conservative and religiously orthodox among the abolitionist fold. As the schism evolved, Wright became a leading opponent of Garrison 's advocacy of issues he considered extraneous to the abolitionist cause. He also vehemently disagreed with the obsessive opposition by the religiously orthodox anti-Garrisonians to an expanded role for women in the movement. "I cannot but regard," he wrote Garrison, "the Boston controversy as wrong, wrong, wrong, on both sides."3 Wright blamed both Garrison and the clerics for the fraticidal invective that threatened to disrupt the tenuous solidarity of the antislavery effort which Wright had labored to maintain as an officer of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Wright's anti-Garrisonian and anticlerical views are bluntly stated in letters to Garrison and to the...

The military, prostitution, and colonial peoples: India and the Philippines, 1885-1917.

British moral reformers, under the leadership of Josephine Butler, Henry J. Wilson and James Stansfeld, successfully campaigned for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. These Acts had introduced a military system of regulated prostitution into England modeled on state regulated prostitution utilized on the Continent from 1864 to 1869. These initial antiprostitution agitations later took the form of a social purification movement. Repeal in 1886 left the British Army in India in noncompliance with Parliamentary efforts at abolition. In 1891 American members of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union undertook a sociological investigation of Indian military cantonments-the Abolitionist cause had been extended to the United States and the Continent. Based on these reports, reformers at home were able to extract admissions from the military and government that the system continued in existence. Nevertheless, the British Army reorganized its program, according to subsequent investigations, into neoregulationism. During World War I, the British Army in India finally abandoned its neoregulationist policy. Symbolic reform was another matter. British reformers met with successes in introducing social purity into Indian social reform. Future campaigns against temple prostitution and Indian social progress grew from these efforts. The American experience with the Philippines was a logical extension of reform policy toward India. Failures paralleled those of British and Indian reformers. As in the case of British reform, there was a redirection of efforts to antiopium and antigambling reforms. Generally, anti-vice reforms were instrumentalities contributing to early efforts at "modernization."

John Quincy Adams on the right of a slave to petition congress

John Quincy Adams’ speech of February 9, 1837, in defense of the right of a slave to petition Congress, was important to the abolitionist cause. But the story of the speech and of the events which brought it about should be told as it happened and not as the historians have erroneously written it.

Public Health: Then and Now

The signers of Declaration of Independence were a varied lot comprising merchants, lawyers, landed gentry, farmers, and political agitators as well as several medical men prominent in colonies. Indeed, first signature on Declaration is that of Josiah Bartlett, a physician who represented the most Easterly Province, and in 1793 became first governor ofNew Hampshire. Another medical signer was Lyman Hall of Georgia, who became governor of his state in 1783 and was instrumental in establishing a state university. Best known today is Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) of Philadelphia, who as a leading physician and teacher not only exerted an important influence on practitioners of his time and for several generations after his death, but is also regarded as father of American psychiatry because of his pioneer endeavor to raise study and treatment of mental and emotional illness to a systematic, scientific level. (For this reason American Psychiatric Association established an annual Benjamin Rush Lecture on Psychiatric History which I inaugurated in May 1967.) In this bicentennial year, therefore, it may be of interest in light of his political and medical experience to examine how Rush viewed impact of American Revolution on health of his contemporaries. Benjamin Rush was born in Byberry, Pennsylvania, son of a farmer and gunsmith. After graduating from College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1760, he was apprenticed to John Redman, a Philadelphia physician. In August 1766, he entered University of Edinburgh and received his medical degree in June 1768 after presenting a thesis on gastric digestion, De coctione ciborum in ventriculo, based on several experiments performed on himself and friends. Shortly after his return to Philadelphia in 1769, Rush was elected professor of chemistry in College of Philadelphia (now University of Pennsylvania) and began practice of medicine. Rush was an early and ardent proponent of American independence. In Edinburgh he had adopted republican principles, and in Philadelphia he became actively involved in colonial resistance to Crown. In 1776, he was elected to Continental Congress and signed Declaration of Independence. Rush joined Continental Army in December of that year and from April 1777 to January 1778 served as surgeon-general of armies of Middle Department. But differences arose between Rush and William Shippen, director-general of medical service, which led to his resignation and resumption of private practice in Philadelphia. In 1789, he was appointed professor of theory and practice of medicine in medical faculty of College of Philadelphia. At same time, Rush continued to advance national unity and foster political stability in young American republic. Thus he advocated adoption of Constitution, and helped to frame Pennsylvania state constitution of 1790. From 1797 to 1813, he served as treasurer of United States Mint. Like his contemporaries Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Rush was a representative of American Enlightenment. A major impulsion toward action for public good was to release mankind from trammels of ignorance and to improve conditions of life in a rational manner. Consequently Rush advocated a national system of education, with various state-supported schools, including a national university and technical schools. He also championed higher education for women, and was largely responsible for founding of Dickinson College in western Pennsylvania. He was also a principal founder, in 1786, of Philadelphia Dispensary for Poor, first free dispensary in United States. The abolition of slavery, temperance and penal reform were other causes for which Rush worked. He was an early and passionate proponent of abolitionist cause, serving as president of Pennsylvania Society for Promoting Abolition of Slavery. Rush was a strong advocate of temperance and legal control of drinking. In 1787, together with Benjamin Franklin and several like-minded men, he organized Philadelphia Society for Alleviating Miseries of Public Prisons. This group succeeded in having death penalty in Pennsylvania abolished for all crimes except murder in first degree. Underlying Rush's medical, political, and reform activities were a group of ideas within which those on social

Radicalism & Reform: The Vrooman Family and American Social Thought, 1837-1937 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS59 dynamic of the pair, who reminds one of James's Verena Tarrant in her vivacity, stage presence, and independence of spirit, won thousands of converts to the abolitionist cause on her New England tour with Sarah in 1837. Although rigorous logic and personal, acute observation determined the sisters' courageous stand against slavery, they displayed an unconventional anger about the failures and the sterile apathy of their society; they were, as the subtitle suggests, rebels, though they always remained southern ladies in the best sense of that rather abused term. To explain how and why they pursued so lonely and unorthodox a course is hardly an easy task, for their personalities defy facile judgments. Angelina married the great abolitionist and organizer Theodore Weld, but she found it very difficult to adjust to the mindless domesticity of the ordinary housewife. Sarah, frustrated in her spinsterhood by the restrictions of career that nineteenth-century society imposed, tried in vain to find satisfaction in helping to raise "dear Theodore's children," but Angelina understandably resented her sister's persistent and devious efforts to dominate her household. Nor was the brilliant Weld a man of simple feelings and commonplace ideas, but rather, like his wife and sister-in-law, he spent his life searching for a spiritual fulfillment that constantly eluded him. After the trio's disillusionment with evangelicalism, they wandered almost aimlessly among various kinds of religious beliefs. Also, they gradually withdrew from antislavery labors after the dismal collapse of evangelical abolitionism in 1840, a retreat that no historian has yet adequately explained. While their contributions to the causes for which they fought—antislavery, educational reform, communitarianism, religious experimentation , and feminine equality—were great, something mysterious and opaque shrouds their motivations and their turmoil of soul. Mrs. Lemer, the first author to portray their careers in a full-length biography since Catherine Beecher published her account in 1885, has written a compelling, frequently eloquent book. The opening chapters are superbly written, especially the passages describing with dramatic power Sarah's ordeal in nursing her dying father at a remote seaside hotel. The biographer is particularly skillful in handling the often subtle interplay between the main characters, and she is sympathetic, while remaining objective, about the sisters' struggles between heart and mind over their roles as women seeking wider vocational and spiritual horizons in an age that discouraged both kinds of adventure. Nevertheless, this work fails to answer some of the basic questions facing antislavery scholars. Relying upon the outworn interpretations of Gilbert Barnes and other predecessors, Mrs. Lemer offers us nothing new about the antislavery cause nor about the Weld-Grimké role in it. (It should be added, however, that Weld's character is better delineated herein than in Benjamin Thomas' sketchy biography.) The author misses too many opportunities to probe the Grimkés' post-exile relations with their southern kinfoik, a failure that only further research in southern archives could resolve. Nor does she explore in sufficient depth their spiritual pilgrimage away from Christian orthodoxy, a course pursued by a rather sizable number of other reform leaders of that era. Moreover, there are signs of hasty production in the editing, selection of illustrations, and in the occasional lapses of style. Mrs. Lemer, however, writes with an artistry all to rare in academic circles, and this book fully merits wide circulation among general readers, though scholars will find it somewhat deficient in original thought about the larger questions which the Grimkés' somber lives encompassed. Bertram Wyatt-Brown Case Western Reserve University Radicalism

Chicago Giant: A Biography of "Long John" Wentworth (review)

Book Reviews345 Chicago Giant: A Biography of "Long John" Wentworth. By Don E. Fehrenbacher . (Madison, Wisconsin: The American History Research Center. 1957. Pp. vii, 278. $4.50.) in Tins WOBK MB. FEHHENBACHEK has made a substantial contribution to American history, particularly to the history of Chicago and the state of Illinois. For readers of Civil War history, the book will be of special interest in its portrayal of the pressures of conflicting ideas and loyalties upon a northern Democratic Congressman in the years just before the Civil War. John Wentworth arrived in Chicago in 1836—a Chicago of some four thousand people huddled on a marshy plain on the shore of Lake Michigan. Entering the rough and tumble of Chicago politics as the virulent editor of the Chicago Democrat , he managed to buy the paper in July, 1837. In a period marked by vigorous but irresponsible journalists, Wentworth's columns, shrewdly based in fact, made the Democrat a power to be reckoned with in Illinois. Subsequently, Wentworth served as Congressman from 1843 to 1851 and from 1853 to 1855, as Mayor of Chicago from 1857 to 1858 and from 1860 to 1861, and again as Congressman from 1865 to 1867. With two terms as mayor and six terms in the House of Representatives, his political experience attained considerable depth. Always aggressive and controversial, he entered politics as a Jacksonian Democrat, but by 1857 was a reluctant Republican and by 1865 a Radical Republican. It is this shift in party affiliation which will be of greatest interest to Civil War readers. The slavery issue started the pendulum swing of Wentworth's career when he became the only Democrat from Illinois to vote for the Wilmot Proviso. He was the only Illinoisan to vote against the Utah Territory Bill (which neither forbade nor authorized slavery). As Mr. Fehrenbacher notes, Wentworth was subjected to "painfully contradictory pressures from his constituents, on the one hand, and the leaders of the Illinois Democracy, on the other." He castigated Pierce for supporting the "Border Ruffians"; he fought popular sovereignty, and finally attended the anti-Nebraska convention held in Bloomington in 1856, although he denied being a Republican. In February, 1857, however, he was nominated for Mayor of Chicago by the Republican partv, and on March 3 was elected the First Republican Mayor of Chicago. In the Presidential campaign of 1860, Wentworth favored Lincoln, but ardently espoused the abolitionist cause, to the discomfiture of Illinois Republicans, who hardly wished to emphasize this faction of their party. So strong were his pronouncements for "Black Republicanism" that some feared a secret Democratic plot was under way to sabotage the Republican party. When Fort Sumter capitulated, Wentworth was a leader in raising troops and supporting the war effort. But he was not suited either physically or temperamentally for the vigors of army life. He is supposed to have exclaimed: "Great heavens abovel If I had physical courage equal to my moral courage, I would make a splendid commander ." To sum up, Chicago Giant is a well written, thoroughly documented, entertaining biography of a man significant in Illinois history. In many ways, mis 346CIVIL WAB HISTORY study of John Wentworth points out the dilemma of northern Democrats in the years prior to the Civil War; the conflict between party loyalty and personal conviction is admirably set forth. Complete with a comprehensive bibliography and index, Chicago Giant is highly recommended to all students of American history. Clyde C. Walton Springfield, Illinois. Congressman Abraham Lincoln. By Donald W. Riddle. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1957. Pp. vii, 280. $4.50.) in his PBEFACE t? this Study, Mr. Riddle states that he has "thoroughly investigated " Lincoln's one term in Congress and that "this field is now covered." Undoubtedly the author has made extensive researches into the sources that touched on Lincoln's rather undistinguished single term in the House of Representatives . It appears, however, that Mr. Riddle finds it necessary to extol the virtues and rectitude of President Polk while growing impatient with Lincoln and actually suspecting his motives. The portrait of Congressman Lincoln that emerges from this account is not as fully drawn as one might wish. To the author Lincoln's...

Montana Politics during the Meagher Regime 1865-1867

DURING THE FOUR YEARS Of the Civil War, while the states east of the Mississippi were engaged in a struggle to determine the fate of the Union, migration to the new Montana gold fields from both the northern and southern states was approaching its highest peak. Pioneers from North and South brought into the Northwest distinct political viewpoints which were to find expression in territorial politics. The southern element, in the majority, controlled the mining communities. However, citizens who had previously lived in the states to the Union were numerous enough to offer vigorous opposition in the political field. By May, 1864, the population had increased to such an extent that Congress passed a law to provide a temporary government for a new territory to be called Montana which included the larger gold fields of the Northwest. At this same time the Republican Congress, as a matter of course, filled the territorial offices with men to the Union and to the Republican party cause. Sidney Edgerton, who had championed the cause of abolition in the halls of Congress, was named governor; the three judges of the supreme court and all fiscal officials were staunch Republicans. The first territorial election to select a delegate to Congress and the members of a legislature was held on October 24, 1864. The Democrats went to the polls in great numbers and their candidate, Samuel McLean, was chosen delegate by a substantial majority over W. E Sanders, who was considered the spokesman of the loyal Republican element in the territory. The territorial council of seven members and the house of thirteen were also to be dominated by southern men. One grave error was committed by this first legislature. The organic act had provided that the time, place, and manner of holding elections, and the apportioning of representatives among the several counties was to be prescribed by territorial law. The legislature took action, but in the bill defining the election districts there was incorporated a provision immediately increasing the number of councilmen to thirteen and the assemblymen to twenty-six rather than the gradual increase in membership as recommended by Congress. Governor Edgerton returned the bill

Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier: In the Roberts Collection at Haverford College

WHITTIER'S LETTERS33 DOCUMENTS LETTERS OF JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER In the Roberts Collection at Haverford College Transcribed and edited by Edward D. Snyder, Professor of English at Haverford College, and Anna B. Hewitt, Assistant Curator of the Roberts Collection. Letter No. 1 This letter takes us further into the tense details of the abolition movement than does any of the other Whittier letters in the Roberts Collection. It deals with an important abolition meeting which has not been stressed by Whittier's biographers, and its casual references re-create for us the days of bitterness and actual martyrdom for the cause of abolition. The Honorable James Gordon Carter (1795-1849) served in both houses of the Massachusetts state legislature, and was distinguished as a reformer in the field of public education. Charles Turner Torrey (1813-1846), a Congregational minister and intense abolitionist, eventually died in the Maryland penitentiary as a direct result of his antislavery work. The arrest to which Whittier refers was in January, 1842, in connection with Torrey's efforts to attend and report the proceedings of a slaveholders' convention held at Annapolis. See Slavery and Antislavery by William Goodell (New York, 1852), pp. 441-445. The "Creole case" refers to a slave ship, and the incident is thus described by McMaster : "Late in October, 1841, the brig Creole, laden with tobacco and conveying five passengers and one hundred and thirty-eight slaves, had sailed from Hampton Roads for New Orleans. When ten days out the negroes rose, killed the owner of many of them, wounded the captain and first mate, and forced the second mate and the crew to take the brig to Nassau. There nineteen of the negroes were held for murder and the rest set free." J. B. MacMaster, A History of the People of the United States (New York, 1910), vol. 7, p. 54. The "trial of J. Q. Adams" refers to an almost forgotten tempest in a teapot which boiled over in January, 1842. For some time the venerable John Quincy Adams had insisted on presenting to the House of Representatives scores of unimportant petitions, dealing largely with the abolition of slavery. On January 21, 1842, he baffled his opponents by presenting from certain citizens of Georgia a petition for his own removal from the chairmanship of an important committee, then by speaking in his own behalf (against the petition which he had just presented), and finally by presenting another petition signed by forty-ifive citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, which called for the peaceable dissolution of these United States ! It is significant that Haverhill was Whittier's birthplace. 34 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION "Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith," is Elihu Burritt (1810-1879), blacksmith , eccentric scholar, and founder of the pacifist weekly, the Christian Citizen. Amesbury 3rd 2nd Mo. 1842 [Addressed to Hon. James G. Carter, Lancaster, Mass.] Dear Friend I suppose thou hast seen by the Emancipator and Free American that we are to have a grand Liberty Meeting in Boston on the 16th inst. Permit me as one of the State Central Committee, to express the hope that thou wilt be with us on that occasion, with as many more from Lancaster as can possibly come. The Ladies too are especially invited—not to make speeches, I suppose ,—but to meet with us as they used to before the vexed question of Womens Rights disturbed us. It will be a great meeting. Old Essex will turn out strong. Let Worcester not be behind. Every thing favors us. Torry's arrest—the Creole case—the trial of J. Q. Adams—all are our auxilliaries. Very truly thy friend JOHN G. WHITTIER P. S. I have in my care a Book which my friend Joseph Sturge wished me to give thee, but have had no convenient opportunity of doing so. Dost thou know Burritt the "Learned Blacksmith"? I am told that he is favorable to our cause. If thou art acquainted with him give him an invitation to attend our meeting. Letter No. 2 The Honorable Henry Stephens Randall (1811-1876), agriculturist, author and leader in the field of public education, was elected in 1851 Secretary of State of New York, and by...

Two Uncollected Prose Sketches of Whittier

T is perhaps fortunate for the average reader that few of Whittier's early prose sketches have survived. Whittier himself was largely responsible for the disappearance of much of his early work, finding in the immaturity of most of it, as his official biographer has intimated,' just cause for shame.2 Yet to the literary historian and biographer the early writings of an author always possess a special interest as illustrating both the sources of his youthful inspiration, and the way these sources found expression. For this reason two tales, alien in thought and style from the Whittier of tradition, may be thought worthy of preservation. These prose pieces were published, and probably written, during the most active period of Whittier's life. The busy years from I833, when he consecrated himself to the cause of abolition, to I840, when he resigned the editorship of the Freeman, were fraught with excitement and hardship for this frail young man. Up to 1836 he retained the ancestral home at Haverhill, and seems to have considered himself primarily a farmer. Yet he had already signed the anti-slavery declaration of I833, and in 1835 had been an active member of the Massachusetts legislature. Nor did his narrow escape from at least two infuriated mobs quench his active spirit. During the next few years he continued to fight for the good cause. Letters to prominent politicians, petitions to the Congress, frequent lobbying in the state legislature formed a significant part of