White Abolitionists Research Articles

Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott

<i>Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America</i> by Elena K. Abbott

Overlooking Blanco White's Abolitionist Consciousness: Menéndez Pelayo and Goytisolo

The purpose of this article is to rethink the modern reception of José María Blanco White's Bosquejo del comercio de esclavos (1814) through an analysis of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo's chapter on Blanco White in his Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880–1882) and Juan Goytisolo's foreword to his anthology Obra inglesa, selecta de sus obras en esta lengua (1972). By drawing on the insights of the "archival turn" taken by contemporary critics, this essay reveals how Menéndez Pelayo's omission of Blanco White's abolitionism had such lasting effects that Goytisolo was unable to rectify it despite his explicit political commitments to human dignity, antislavery, and antiracism. Ultimately, this article shows that Goytisolo failed to treat Blanco White's abolitionist sentiment as a historical topic in its own right because he mounted a political challenge to Menéndez Pelayo's portrayal of Blanco White, but at the same time left untouched the power inscribed in the Catholic polymath's archival narrative.

Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality: Clergy, African Americans, and Women United for Abolition by Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore

Reviewed by: Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality: Clergy, African Americans, and Women United for Abolition by Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore Rochelle E. Danquah Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore. Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality: Clergy, African Americans, and Women United for Abolition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. 254 pp. $28.00 (paper). With the Northwest Ordinance (1787), the Confederation Congress prohibited slavery in the states that would become the Midwest. Nonetheless, slavery did exist in midwestern states. The state of Illinois, for example, subjected African Americans to Black Codes, servitude contracts, racial mob violence, and other forms of White terrorism. Shadrach Bond, the state's first governor, owned several enslaved African Americans. Against this backdrop of blatant support for an institution supposedly banned since 1787, forces began organizing to abolish slavery in Illinois and the United States. Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality: Clergy, African Americans, and Women United for Abolition explores the relationship among, and inner workings of, three groups that formed an alliance to end slavery. Authors Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore claim politicians and White abolitionists such as Owen Lovejoy, African Americans, and women all "agreed to put abolition ahead of the other needed reform movements of the day and decided that the constitutional political system offered the best way to break the spell of the Slave Power" (1). As early as 1824, proslavery legislators attempted to legalize slavery in [End Page 83] Illinois. Unsuccessful, they continued to make the state an unwelcoming space for African Americans. The authors acknowledge that African Americans were "the primary instigators of the antislavery movement [in Illinois]" (6), but proslavery agitators responded with "physical violence" to perpetuate White supremacy. Most famously, Lovejoy's older brother Elijah was murdered by a proslavery mob in Alton for publishing an antislavery newspaper. Lovejoy's coalition "responded with political activism, building a succession of political parties that envisioned practical and progressive legislation on behalf of African Americans, ultimately becoming the operative radical core of the Republican Party" (5). Owen Lovejoy's leadership, uncompromising antislavery sentiments, and pervasive political activism—in conjunction with African Americans, clergy, and women—helped to transform racial barriers and unjust policies in America. Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality consists of nine chapters that encompass Lovejoy's life as an abolitionist, politician, and revolutionary Christian organizer from 1811 to 1864. Chapters 1 through 3 describe Lovejoy's life from childhood to young adulthood and the experiences that shaped his antipathy toward slavery. In Chapter 2, the authors claim Lovejoy "had a transforming experience" while working with African American ministers Henry Highland Garnet, Samuel Ringgold Ward, and Charles B. Ray at the 1843 Liberty Party convention. These men showed Lovejoy an example of Black agency, and they clearly demonstrated that African Americans, whether free or enslaved, were capable of determining and defining their demands for freedom, justice, and equality. This example of Black advocacy became a pivotal teaching moment in Lovejoy's life that would continue to have a profound impact on his religious conviction and radical antislavery opinions. Chapters 4 through 6 concentrate on Lovejoy's political career in Illinois and his antislavery coalition that grew with the support of African Americans and women between 1852 and 1859. He was instrumental in organizing the Republican Party in Illinois, forging a close friendship with Abraham Lincoln. In 1856, Lovejoy won a congressional seat and immediately started working to repeal proslavery laws. The authors argue that "Lovejoy expanded the Illinois coalition with Black clergy and leading women at the national level" to continue the fight for abolition (132). Chapters 7 and 8 discuss Lovejoy's political career and the coalition's continued efforts to eradicate slavery from 1859 to 1864. During this period, he continued to serve in the House of Representatives, and he steadfastly [End Page 84] supported Lincoln even when Confederate military victories and northern Democrats threatened the president's political fortunes. This section of the book examines in great detail his efforts to move beyond merely ending slavery as he "pushed legislation reflecting the priorities of Blacks, women, and churchmen in the coalition for equality" (175). Jane...

Standard-Bearers of Equality: America's First Abolition Movement by Paul J. Polgar

Reviewed by: Standard-Bearers of Equality: America's First Abolition Movement by Paul J. Polgar Eric Herschthal (bio) Standard-Bearers of Equality: America's First Abolition Movement. By Paul J. Polgar. (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 342. Cloth, $39.95.) For the past several decades, many scholars have portrayed the original abolitionist societies of the revolutionary era as pale comparisons to their more radical antebellum successors. Unlike the Garrisonian movement, the first abolitionist societies prioritized gradual emancipation laws that promised freedom to enslaved people only after they completed decades of service and only to those born after the law's passage. These societies were composed exclusively of well-heeled white men, who believed that [End Page 107] the best way to defeat prejudice and give freed Black Americans a fighting chance at full citizenship was for free Blacks to uplift themselves through education, sobriety, and moral rectitude. Though early abolitionists helped all six original northern states pass some form of gradual emancipation law by 1804, in less than two decades newly freed Black northerners were stripped of basic citizenship rights, while many early white abolitionists began to see colonization—the voluntary removal of freed Blacks—as the only viable path to nationwide emancipation. In Paul Polgar's audacious account of what he calls "first movement abolitionism," this narrative requires revision. The first abolitionist societies worked closely with free Black northerners and fervently advocated full Black citizenship. While Polgar does not deny early white abolitionists' paternalism or ignore the limitations of their gradualist approach, he convincingly demolishes any presumption that the first abolitionist societies were skeptical about Black people's essential equality or equal place in the new nation. Though first movement abolitionists displayed less militancy and urgency than Garrisonians, they were no less committed to the complete destruction of slavery and racism. Standard-Bearers of Equality focuses on the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) and the New-York Manumission Society (NYMS), the early republic's most influential abolition societies, as well as their close relationships with the nation's most prominent free Black leaders: Absalom Jones, James Forten, and Peter Williams Jr., among many others. By closely reading abolition society minutes and the papers of free Black northern leaders, Polgar underscores that early abolitionism was far more interracial than an emphasis on the exclusively white membership of the early societies suggests. Moreover, he shows that early white abolitionists' interests in funding free Black schools and churches, rooted in a belief that Black uplift would defeat white racism, was nearly identical to what many Black northern leaders promoted. Though it may have been paternalistic and naive to believe that proper Black behavior would eradicate white racism, it was neither exclusive to white abolitionists nor evidence of anti-Black prejudice. Polgar contends that early abolitionists' support for full Black citizenship can be best evinced in their basic strategy of enforcing and expanding the first gradual emancipation laws—premised on the assumption that enslavement was a violation of what Polgar calls "elemental citizenship" (143). But a more compelling case lies in the mountain of evidence he provides that show Black and white abolitionists routinely challenging any attempt to curb free Black political rights. When the New York state legislature considered its first gradual emancipation law in 1785, slavery's [End Page 108] advocates added amendments that would have denied Black men the right to vote, hold office, and serve on juries featuring white defendants. But the NYMS rallied against the bill precisely because it would have turned freed Blacks into second-class citizens. (The eventual abolition that did pass in 1799 placed no restrictions on Black political rights.) Likewise, white and Black abolitionists successfully defeated the Pennsylvania legislature's numerous attempts to curb Black voting rights between 1805 and 1813. Yet early abolitionists' initial optimism began to sour in the 1820s. In his final chapters, Polgar meticulously reconstructs the reasons why many, if hardly all, white abolitionists began to embrace colonization in the 1820s. The emergence of the American Colonization Society in 1816 reinvigorated a conservative antislavery impulse in the Upper South, convincing many northern white abolitionists that southern slaveholders could...

«Точка сборки»: «Хижина дяди Тома» и американская культурная модель черной расы

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852) being the most powerful statement on the racial issue in the 19th century American literature, succeeded to incorporate and rethink everything that the national tradition had in stock on the problem of slavery and race relations. The Black racial / cultural identity model that was taking shape in the 18th century Anglo-American literature, later was being enriched and transformed throughout American (and African-American) literary history. Uncle Tom's Cabin became another crucial text (the next one after Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia) that provided the emerging Black cultural / racial identity model with a new quality: it became universal, nationally recognized — and at the same time a point of controversy provoking endless debates and open for dynamic change and transformations, as was the case with anti-Tom literature and the ambivalent reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in African American literary tradition. The analysis of The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) by Caroline Lee Hentz, a typical example of anti-Tom novels, gives an idea of the pro-slavery response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The final part of the paper is a survey of the main stages in African American response since the 1853 argument between Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass that became a matrix for the further polemic, and up to Henry Louis Gates’s subversive “double-voiced” interpretation of the novel which is in full agreement with the tendency to revise the role of white Abolitionists in the antislavery movement and African American history, typical for African American studies in the 1990s–2000s.

White Skin, Silvered Plate: Encountering Jonathan Walker’s Branded Hand in Daguerreotype

In an 1841 speech in Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass reflected that his white abolitionist colleagues ‘cannot speak as I can from experience; they cannot refer you to a back covered with scars, as I can; for I have felt these wounds’.1 Just a few years later, a white man named Jonathan Walker would emerge to complicate this claim. In 1844, Walker was apprehended along with seven enslaved men – Anthony Catlett, brothers Charles, Leonard, Moses, and Philip Johnson, and brothers Harry and Silus Scott – while sailing from Florida to the Bahamas. This attempted self-emancipation marked only a brief appearance in the historical record for the seven passengers in Walker’s boat, while it made Walker worthy of press and attention for years to come, all the more so because he received an unusual sentence: his right palm was branded with the letters SS for slave stealer. In the following years, he presented his branded hand as physical proof of the brutality of slavery to eager crowds around the Northeast, sometimes appearing alongside Frederick Douglass at abolitionist events. Like Douglass, Walker could speak from experience authenticated by scars, yet the small marks on his hand attested to only eleven months of imprisonment, rather than two decades of enslavement. Looking back on the antebellum era on the occasion of Walker’s death in 1878, Douglass wrote, ‘I well remember the sensation produced by the exhibition of his branded hand. It was one of the few atrocities of slavery that roused the justice and humanity of the North to a death struggle with slavery.’2

Listening for Silences: The Trap of Biased Sources

Listening for Silences: The Trap of Biased Sources

The Sun in its Glory: The Diffusion of Jonathan Dymond’s Works in the United States, 1831–1836

The English Quaker and linen-draper Jonathan Dymond (1796-1828) is best known for his strong philosophic articulation of the testimony against war. The first American edition of Dymond’s work, though, was published not by Quakers but by a small group of activist-thinkers in north-eastern Connecticut, the Windham County Peace Society, which issued a thousand copies of Dymond’s The Applicability of the Pacific Principles of the New Testament to the Conduct of States in the spring of 1832. Dymond’s systematic moral philosophy extended into many corners of the burgeoning philanthropic movements in New England, most notably among Immediate Abolitionists, within the Peace movement and in support of the extension of women’s education. Numerous non-Quakers embraced and publicised his thought in this period: William Lloyd Garrison, the multi-religious family of George Benson Sr., famed Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing, Unitarian Abolitionist Samuel J. May, Abolitionist editor Charles Burleigh, Thomas Grimké and his famous sisters Sarah and Angelina. Perhaps the most intriguing instance of this concerns white Abolitionist educator Prudence Crandall - a former Quaker herself - and the Black students attending the Canterbury Academy where she taught; they had access to chapters from Dymond’s Essays on the Principles of Morality prior to that book’s publication in the United States. This article focuses on the theoretical and practical aspects of Dymond’s contention that Christianity must call forth moral consistency, coupled with his evident respect for women’s intellect. These features of his thought gave to this influential generation of New England Abolitionists a philosophical-religious base. This article expands the understanding of Dymond’s American impact past its obvious relevance in Garrisonian non-resistance to an appreciation of how his moral philosophy fitted the radical ethos of the 1830s.

Spirited away: Race, slavery and childhood in early modern England

AbstractThis essay explores the insidious but persistent desire to affix whiteness to modes of bondage and to argue for an original ‘white slavery’ located in early modern forms of traffic, indenture and forced transport. This essay aims to recover the genealogy of this belief, beginning with one of its conceptual origins: the practice of ‘spiriting’ in the seventeenth century. Reading accounts of ‘spiriting’, I firstly trace the narrative genealogies of English bondage to argue that consent emerges as a racialised rubric. Secondly, I think in particular about the representation of (very different kinds of) spirits in contemporary literary and cultural texts, including The Tempest, to suggest that even as they engage and anticipate the practice of ‘spiriting’, they also strategically elide their own histories of the traffic and transport of non‐white bodies. As one early modern understanding of ‘spiriting’ specifically comes to associate the practice with the capture and bondage of children, the nexus of slavery, race and children emerges as particularly fraught. If ‘white slavery’ denotes the limit case for the legibility of slavery, the photographs of ‘white’ enslaved children later circulated by white abolitionists in the nineteenth century to invoke sympathy for their cause played on the fundamental irreconcilability of ‘whiteness’ and bondage even as they re‐asserted the imbrication of slavery and sanguinity. This study attends to the trajectory of discourses of slavery written on and in the body to explore the histories of both a contemporary and an insistently current investment in frameworks of ‘white slavery’, as it attempts to discover the early modern frameworks for the legibility of race and slavery as they were co‐articulated ‘before’ the supposed ‘emergence’ of either.

On the Skin: Mary Prince and the Narration of Black Feeling in the Early Nineteenth Century

Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, transcribed and edited by white abolitionists in England in 1831, was an early entry into the slave narrative genre, the first for an enslaved Black woman in the Americas. This article argues that Prince unsettles dominant critical practices in nineteenth-century literary studies and Black studies in her unsentimental description of laboring and subjected Black skin. Her History, written the same year that Nat Turner's Rebellion took place in the United States and just two years before a decree of emancipation across the British Caribbean and the entire British empire, speaks of Black skin as vulnerable and permeable, but also as emotionally and morally intelligent. In doing so, her narrative makes a claim to a racial characteristic of Black feeling as different from, and superior to, white feeling. For Prince the form of the slave narrative becomes, rather than constraining and disciplining, a platform for articulating embodied Black knowledge and epistemological expertise.

The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America by Robert H. Churchill

Reviewed by: The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America by Robert H. Churchill Crystal Webster (bio) The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America. By Robert H. Churchill. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 256. Cloth, $99.99; paper, $24.99.) Scholars have increasingly centered violence as a category of analysis in order to provide nuance to historical events and periods. This trend in the historiography is reflected in the groundbreaking scholarship of Joanne Freeman, Stanley Harrold, and Kellie Carter Jackson, each of whom have focused on physical violence in historical periods and political movements that earlier had been represented as refined, passive, and respectable. Robert Churchill contributes to this historiography with The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America. In Churchill’s telling of the story of fugitive slavery, violence was ubiquitous on the route to freedom. Those involved in violence ranged from enslavers and slave catchers to antislavery activists. This violence and conflict along the Underground Railroad, argues Churchill, led to the radicalization of antislavery activism, violent expressions of mastery, and the development of regional identity, which in turn aggravated the sectional divisions and conflict leading up to the Civil War. Robert Churchill’s history challenges the ways in which popular representations of the Underground Railroad perpetuate it as a mythic, elusive element of American history. Scholarship on the Underground Railroad began with William Still’s Underground Railroad Records (1872) and other primary-source collections of first-person accounts of those who aided fugitive slaves. More recently, scholars have breathed new life into the significance of fugitive slavery, including Richard Blackett, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, and Fergus Bordewich. In particular, Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2015) makes clear that the scope and scale of the fugitive slave experience was crucial to the events that led to the Civil War. By centering the role of violence, Robert Churchill upends romanticized and static histories of the Underground Railroad, thus complicating its history and providing fresh insight into this increasingly popular topic. A clear strength of the book is its conceptualization and explanation of the sociospatial geography of the Underground Railroad. The book is organized around both chronological and regional distinctions, which consist of [End Page 272] the Borderland, the Contested Region, and the Free Soil Region. Churchill excels in his in-depth geographic descriptions of the physical and social landscape for each region and analyzes the ways in which these contexts shaped the function of violence in the movement. Through descriptive and visual explanation, Churchill reveals how political and spatial geography are key to understanding how violence was wielded. In the Borderland, slave catchers were aggressively violent in ways that extended the reach of slave mastery. Here, slave catchers and enslavers dominated the fugitive experience and prevailed even against whites who may have been sympathetic to the antislavery cause. While some locals of the Contested Region provided shelter and aid to African American fugitives, white residents were less likely to defend escaped enslaved people against violent slave catchers, particularly when legal mores were appropriately followed. Locals nonetheless rejected the violence exhibited by slaveholders and slave catchers as violating ideas of dignity and restraint. In the Free Soil region, local whites reacted aggressively to slave catching and kidnapping and defended fugitives to the death. These distinctions give a greater sense of depth to the Underground Railroad at a community and regional level, appropriately portraying the movement as a “living organism responding to local stimuli” (17). Churchill’s Underground Railroad is therefore not only one of fugitive slaves, slave catchers, and white abolitionists, but also one of space and culture. The movement, in turn, shaped the regions through which fugitives fled. Many of Churchill’s sources that reveal these differing regional cultures will not be unfamiliar to scholars of the period, and those sources rely on reflections on the movement by predominantly white activists, which can lean heroic. However, Churchill complicates the sources with in-depth analysis and explanation of the local and regional history. A strong intervention of the book is that violence in the Underground Railroad led to the type of sectional conflict...

Standard-Bearers of Equality: America's First Abolition Movement by Paul J. Polgar

Reviewed by: Standard-Bearers of Equality: America's First Abolition Movement by Paul J. Polgar Richard Newman (bio) Abolitionism, Black abolishionists, Slavery, Antislavery, African American history Standard-Bearers of Equality: America's First Abolition Movement. By Paul J. Polgar. (Chapel Hill: The Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 342. Cloth, $39.95; ebook $29.99.) In Standard Bearers of Equality, Paul Polgar challenges scholars to reframe their very understanding of early abolitionism in the United States. Focusing on "first movement" activists between the 1770s and 1820s, he argues that Black as well as white reformers shaped an egalitarian vision of American society that remains powerful centuries later. Indeed, as he concludes, while early activists failed to slay slavery nationally and end white prejudice in the North, "the most enduring legacy of America's first abolition movement was its abiding faith that a world free from black oppression and inequality was possible" (325). Full of insightful analysis and bracingly written, this is a bold book to reckon with. Yet Polgar also pushes early abolitionist radicalism too far, raising key questions about the first movement's ultimate impact on American and Atlantic society. Polgar's study comes at a key moment for abolitionist historiography. On the one hand, much recent work focuses on African American struggles for justice before the Civil War. Books by Martha Jones, Christopher Bonner, and Kellie Carter Jackson have pictured Black activists as the center of a decades-long movement for immediate abolition, birthright citizenship, and civic equality. On the other hand, the Caribbean turn in Atlantic studies—including seminal work by Laurent Dubois, Vincent [End Page 299] Brown, and Ed Rugemer, among others—has focused increasing attention on the impact of slave rebellion on emancipation movements and laws between the 1760s and 1830s. In both cases, early American abolitionists have been pushed to the margins of Atlantic reform. Even the legendary David Brion Davis, whose early work focused on the power of Anglo American abolitionism before 1820, later saw Caribbean slave rebellion—which resulted in immediate freedom for hundreds of thousands of enslaved people—and the advent of the Black republic of Haiti as the keys to understanding Atlantic society's "first emancipations" (see The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 45). So just what did early abolitionists do? Polgar takes on this question with gusto and verve. As he puts it, while "the racially progressive origins of American abolitionism" have been "buried" by recent scholars, it is clear that early activists offered a "reform blueprint" that made universal freedom and racial equality essential goals of modern democratic society (7–8). First movement reformers sought to strip slavery of its legal, constitutional, and political protections where they could, especially in the U.S. North. "In so doing, they built a reform agenda" that was also "premised on the eventual overturning of Black degradation" as an organizing principle across American society (7). For Polgar, the long march to Black freedom begins with first movement abolitionists. Idealists as well pragmatists, early abolitionists argued that changing African Americans' circumstances would shift racial destinies in the United States. Deploying new understandings of societal environmentalism, early abolitionists "pinned Black inequality on the circumstances of slavery"—their oppressive environment—and "not [on] the inner character of people of color," as many anti-abolitionists did (133). By rejecting the concept of innate Black inferiority, early abolitionists imagined a world defined by human equality rather than slavery. The first steps toward building that world occurred in the U.S. North, where early abolitionists secured gradual emancipation laws that would take effect over several decades. But first movement activists also vigorously prosecuted masters who violated these laws, often winning outright freedom for some African Americans. Polgar shows that white abolitionists in Pennsylvania and New York brought forth 520 cases of illegal enslavement over the span of a decade, enjoying an 84 percent success rate. In Pennsylvania abolitionist complaints also persuaded the state government to close slave-trading loopholes in the gradual abolition act of 1780. By enforcing and even expanding statutory abolition, first movement [End Page 300] activists made clear to slaveholders and others that they would remain vigilant...

The Underground Railroad in Jefferson County, Indiana: An Interracial Partnership Ahead of Its Time

The history of the Underground Railroad has long been marked by contentious debate. Surviving evidence from Jefferson County, Indiana, sheds new light on the day-today operations of the Underground Railroad in southeastern Indiana and the Ohio River border region. Historian J. Michael Raley examines the complex interracial network of fugitive slaves, their enslaved and free black families and friends, the free black residents of the Georgetown community in Madison, Indiana, and white abolitionists from area churches and antislavery societies. Their efforts were not without risk. In aiding runaway slaves in their flight northward, people of color secretly collaborated with trusted whites at grave peril to themselves and their families, and despite all efforts, fugitives from slavery far too often were recaptured in route. For those who succeeded in reaching Canada as well as for those who aided them, however, the potential dangers were always more than worth the risk.

Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence by Kellie Carter Jackson

Reviewed by: Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence by Kellie Carter Jackson Richard S. Newman (bio) Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. By Kellie Carter Jackson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 224. Cloth, $34.95.) What role does violence play in the struggle for social change? That is the challenging question Kellie Carter Jackson asks in her stimulating and thought-provoking book on black abolitionists and the politics of violence [End Page 263] before the Civil War. More than an examination of violent means in the classic abolitionist struggle, Jackson’s book offers a deeper meditation on the way that force has framed black freedom struggles. As she notes, “The trajectory of change in black America has almost always depended upon the local, state, and federal government’s willingness to accept (or be forced to accept) black humanity” (162). And that struggle has always entailed forceful confrontations with white politicians and citizens—sometimes physical, sometimes rhetorical, but always ramifying. From slave rebellions to self-defense measures to explosive oratory that galvanized blacks and scared white audiences, Jackson notes that force was never far from the black freedom movement. Yet, she asserts, too many abolitionist scholars still “privilege the performance of nonviolence” (3). Only when we see “violence as the great accelerator in American emancipation” will scholars have a more accurate understanding of black abolitionism’s power and importance (3). Though Jackson perhaps underrates the way that other scholars have examined violence in abolitionism, this book is an essential read. Indeed, it is a book meant not only for scholars of abolitionism and the Civil War but for anyone interested in the way that activist struggles often straddle the line between prophetic words and forceful (even violent) action. Jackson’s book is forcefully argued. While she ranges beyond the nineteenth century in introductory and concluding sections, Jackson focuses tightly on black abolitionists’ understanding of violence as both tactic and strategy during the antebellum era. In five main chapters, she examines several key themes in the black radical tradition: the creation of a usable iconography of black rebellion, debates over the limits of moral suasion and the importance of physical self-defense tactics in northern black communities, and the wider meaning of black resistance on the eve of sectional war. Jackson flips the traditional script in abolitionist historiography by making nonviolent activists and antislavery political organizers the outliers to a black-centered struggle held together literally by the concept of force. As she notes, white reformers consistently contained black activists’ call for physical responses to proslavery violence. In the wake of Elijah Lovejoy’s killing in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, white abolitionists counseled local blacks against arming themselves. Little wonder that African Americans revered John Brown, who, far from containing black uprising, sought to join it. That search for truly forceful friends became a key component of black liberation. Jackson joins a host of other scholars in noting that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 served as a tipping point for the entire abolitionist movement. Yet while many white activists now supported black self-defense tactics, many others still saw nonviolence (in the form of political mobilization or [End Page 264] moral suasion) as the best strategy for undercutting slavery as a national institution. Blacks dissented, espousing proactive forms of rebellion. They valorized slave uprising and made enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law “a dangerous endeavor” (53). In this way, blacks helped make the 1850s “one of the most violent eras in US history” (53). The Civil War didn’t just come; it was beckoned by black activists who literally wanted to fight for freedom. Though Jackson’s book takes on abolitionist historiography, it also flows from broader scholarly attempts to place violence at the center of American history. From Joanne Freeman’s The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (2018), on violence in American politics, to Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (2013), which focuses on state-sponsored violence against Native Americans during the Civil War, a range of scholars has sought to link violence, reform, and nation...

Teaching Eighteenth-Century Black Lives

Teaching Eighteenth-Century Black Lives Kathleen Lubey (bio) Like other contributors to this forum and many others in our field, I aim to use the eighteenth-century classroom as an invitation for students to learn more about the history of the modern racism that shapes their own lives and the lives of people immediately nearby. I was on a Chawton Library fellowship in July 2016 when Philando Castile was killed by police in Minnesota. His death felt discomfitingly far away from the privileges of Chawton—rural splendor, intellectual retreat, an archive focused on white women writers. My students also felt far away, and I spent several days struggling to think about how my research efforts mattered to the work I'd be doing in the classroom when I returned home. As this piece goes to press in the summer of 2020, we are living the grave reality that the systemized murder of Black people, often at the hands of police, continues apace. In the name of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and their fellow victims recognized under #SayTheirName, many of us are taking action to call for immediate, material, and radical reform of institutions threatening Black lives, from police forces to universities to the White House. This activism must inform our teaching: as experts in the period containing the apex of the British slave trade as well as its slow erosion under the pressures of abolitionism, we have the opportunity (I would argue, the responsibility) to help students understand the racially unjust present that we have inherited. [End Page 145] I teach in Queens, reportedly the most diverse county in the country. My students are largely from the metropolitan area and many are socioeconomically disadvantaged—St. John's University has a strong and real mission to educate immigrant and low-income populations, with 37 percent of students Pell-eligible; the majority are first-generation college students; the student body is 44 percent students of color.1 Literature classrooms fall short of this statistic but still reflect a relatively unusual degree of inclusion, one that invites faculty continually to revisit questions of relevance and immediacy of the curriculum for students. A course on the English novel focusing on genre and gender, which I had lined up for the spring after my summer in Hampshire, didn't seem at that moment the most urgent side of the period to show to students, most of whom would be taking the course to fulfill a historical division requirement. I asked my chair for a "special topics" designation to accommodate a course focusing on Black lives, which he immediately granted, and I got to work during my Chawton evenings compiling a long overdue bibliography of primary and secondary materials for a course called "The Matter of Eighteenth-Century Black Lives." The title borrows its terms from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, converting "matter" into a noun that points to our period's discourse on Black life, the traffic in humans of the Middle Passage, and the calls for social justice produced by authors of African, Caribbean, and European origin. I have since taught the course twice at the undergraduate level. It is, without exception, the eighteenth-century course in which students have been most vocal and empowered to speak. Many are already experienced themselves in the injustices covered in our readings: geographical displacement, state-sanctioned violence, white apologism and respectability politics, the ethics of sympathy, political and economic disenfranchisement, mass incarceration. We begin with Ignatius Sancho's letters and Phillis Wheatley's poems, then move backward in time to Oroonoko and the primary materials collected in Catherine Gallagher's Bedford/St. Martin's edition. We then move forward again to the 1780s and abolitionism, beginning with Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery, moving to white abolitionist poetry by Anna Barbauld, Hannah More, and William Cowper, and concluding with the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour, now teachable thanks to Lyndon Dominique's Broadview edition. Along the way we touch on some contemporary journalism and cultural studies—Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations," and Michele Alexander's The New Jim Crow—to give students a...

Abandoned Tracks: The Underground Railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania

Abandoned Tracks: The Underground Railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania

Bodily Wreckage, Economic Salvage and the Middle Passage

In spring 2018 a digitally manipulated seascape flowed around London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Sondra Perry’s installation Typhoon Coming On (2018) animates a part of J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840), a painting depicting the Zong massacre of 1781 where the captain of a British ship threw 133 enslaved people overboard in pursuit of economic compensation through the ship’s insurance policy. As a maritime catastrophe that reveals anti-blackness and finance capital to be co-constitutive phenomena, the Zong massacre provides Perry with the means to contemplate the Atlantic as a site for the transformation of bodily wreckage into economic salvage under the commercial logic of racial capitalism. In this article I explore Perry’s remediation of Turner’s painting by thinking about the co-choreography of bodies and ocean in each of these seascapes. In her refusal to stage the bodily wreckage of the Middle Passage, Perry presents the transatlantic slave trade not as an exceptional event punctuating the history of seafaring but as the very foundation of capitalist modernity. Responding to concepts developed by Édouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter and Christina Sharpe, I consider the ways Perry critiques Turner’s depiction of the slave ship’s bodily wreckage and his attendant white abolitionist morality, and instead remediates the scene of the Zong massacre around the whispered presences of Black liberation.

Black Women and/in the Shadow of Romanticism

ABSTRACTThis essay argues that the study of Blackness in Romanticism centers on the spectacularity of violence to Black men and on work by white abolitionists. The result is the marginalization of Black women in Romantic studies proper. After discussing some of the major causes of this phenomenon, the essay offers three principles to help Romantic scholarship move Black women from Romanticism’s margins to its center: do the work; think about the everydayness of race; and “don’t forget the women.” It ends with an appeal to recover the work of Eva B. Dykes, the first Black woman to qualify for a doctorate degree in the United States and the author of The Negro in English Romantic Thought (1942).

Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 406. $20.00 (cloth).

Martha Hodes, <i>Mourning Lincoln</i>. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 406. $20.00 (cloth).

The Time to Rise: Imagining Black Maturation in Blake

The Time to Rise:Imagining Black Maturation in Blake Jennifer J. Baker (bio) Narratives of maturation were central to the autobiography and fiction of the U.S. antislavery moment. In this literature, the black mind's capacity for intellectual and spiritual growth offered proof of black humanity, and examples of notable black men and women were especially important in showcasing the latent powers and potential of peoples of African descent. Individual maturation in the face of crushing odds demonstrated a collective potential that could, in turn, challenge proslavery claims of black inferiority. "No race so abused, maltreated, and enslaved, could have developed faster than the African during the last fifty years," Harriet Beecher Stowe declared in 1858. "Although the world has been in arms against them … there is now no manner of doubt that the race is rising."1 Although Stowe hails a collective "rising" of the "race," the focus of antislavery novels and autobiographies was almost always individual maturation. Such texts, organized around narratives of character formation and coming of age, used the single life to advocate the need for emancipation and rehabilitation. Martin R. Delany's only novel, Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859–62), is remarkable in that it deliberately does not tell the story of its hero's bildung, opting instead to feature a character who is already a "mature West Indian" when the story commences. Although the first half of Blake reads like a fugitive's tale, Henry Blake, as it turns out, was raised free in Cuba and does not grapple with the developmental challenges typical of the slave narrative. His story is not about overcoming odds to acquire literacy, enlightenment, and consciousness of himself as a free subject but rather a quest to liberate and elevate peoples of African descent.2 "Maturation," a term that appears more than a dozen times in the novel, is a central concern of Blake, but rather than depict the process through which an individual [End Page 239] matures, the novel dramatizes the importance of mature leadership for black liberation and elevation. As defined in critical age studies, "maturation" is the acquisition of various markers of adulthood, including physical strength, learning, autonomy, financial independence, and legal and political rights; as such, it is distinct from "aging," or the passing of the years of one's existence. When he describes individuals as mature in Blake, Delany refers to a set of traits related to decision making: mature individuals are circumspect, deliberate, tempered, and adept at long-term planning. Delany believed such qualities were as important as revolutionary fervor, for "no great project was ever devised without the consultation of the most mature intelligence, and discreet discernment and precaution."3 Mature individuals could envision, plan for, and help realize black futurity. Maturation is crucial for the rise of black leadership in Blake, but it is not a process restricted to individuals. Consistent with nineteenth-century theories of historical change, the novel also presents revolution, social progress, and the amelioration of human problems as themselves processes of maturation. In this sense, the term is closely allied with the word "development" as it was used in life sciences to designate a progressive, and even teleological, emergence of new conditions or new life forms. As a practicing physician and lecturer on comparative anatomy and ethnology, Delany appreciated the common impulse among scientific thinkers to map growth phases of individuals on to phases of social advancement and historical progress. Emancipation, uplift, and other reforms were thought to unfold steadily but on their own time and only under the right conditions. Although this organic development should neither be rushed nor stalled, according to Delany, it would need to be supervised and facilitated by circumspect leaders who understood the delicacy of this timing. For this reason, Delany often conjoins different, but always interrelated, forms of individual, collective, and historical maturation. That the concept was multiply resonant for Delany's thinking on black uplift is clear in a letter he penned to fellow black abolitionist James T. Holly objecting to Holly's support for a Haitian emigration project headed by a white abolitionist. Delaney characterizes the project as an affront to black manhood because it grants...