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Reviews in American History 33.3 (2005) 359-365



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The Ambiguity of Benevolence

Susan M. Ryan. The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. 235 pp. Illustrations and notes. $49.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

Faith, hope, and charity. And the greatest of these is charity. So were the triad of Christian virtues ordered, and no more compellingly than during the antebellum period. It was a time of extraordinary economic transformation and geographic expansion, when a variety of reform movements, notably the opposition to slavery, sought to remake the republic. Ralph Waldo Emerson exclaimed in 1844, "What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world!"1 In her important book, The Grammar of Good Intentions, Susan M. Ryan focuses on how reformers came to terms with a society in which white supremacy was the norm. As a literary scholar, she is concerned with the representation of race, class, and benevolence, particularly in the writing of Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, and Charlotte Forten. The contentious issues of Indian removal, slavery, abolition, and racial identity loom large. She offers critical insights into often-familiar texts and helpfully sets her own interpretations in the context of recent scholarship. Most significantly, the author complicates the concept of benevolence, one that entangles the donor and recipient in a reciprocal relationship of giving and receiving, dominance and subordination. Although not cited, one is reminded of Edward Said's instructive Orientalism (1978) in which power and perception are intertwined. At times, it would add to the argument if the author went beyond the literary sources to include pertinent political, legal, and biographical information. Nonetheless, Ryan makes an original contribution to the understanding of the antebellum period with the study of race and the culture of benevolence.

What was once termed the Age of Jackson might well be renamed the Age of Benevolence. As Ryan rightly puts it, "The field changes considerably, though, if benevolence is understood as a central paradigm in antebellum culture, one that provided Americans with ways of understanding, describing, and constructing their racial and national identities" (p. 5). The assumptions of evangelical Protestantism and white racism permeated not only the [End Page 359] larger society but also the imperative of almsgiving. Historians explain the fervor of the Second Great Awakening in terms of exceptional social transformation and wrenching personal dislocation. For the faithful, then and now, religious revivalism is no less than the movement of the divine spirit to redeem a sinful world. Although the benevolent empire had ecclesiastic roots, its branches reached out in many directions. Emerson acutely observed that "attention must be commanded by the signs that the Church, or religious party, is falling from the church nominal, and is appearing in temperance and non-resistance societies, in movements of abolitionists and of socialists, and in very significant assemblies, called Sabbath and Bible Conventions, composed of ultraists, of seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, and meeting to call in question the authority of the Sabbath, of the priesthood, and of the church."2 Whether overtly religious or ostensibly secular, reformers sought to convert and correct according to cultural norms.

Benevolence took specific form in the era before the Civil War. For whites, charity to distressed Indians and African Americans affirmed the worthiness and pre-eminence of the benefactor. For women, social engagement asserted their active citizenship and aspiration to equal rights with their male counterparts. For Indians and African Americans, white benevolence had to be reconfigured so it was empowering, while strategies for self-help, a means to claim complete citizenship, had to be formulated. White commentators fretted about how to distinguish the deserving from the unworthy, including the duplicitous. They worried about damaging dependency and the defiant autonomy of those on the margins of society. Whatever the conundrums, the compassionate deity of nineteenth-century Protestant theology mandated the imperative to do good deeds. Complemented by the humanitarianism of the Enlightenment and the civic duty of the new republic, a fabric of sensibility...

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