Black Abolitionists (review)

274CIVIL WAR HISTORY is the power to destroy"—passed over directly into Marshall's opinion, along with Webster's more complex argument against state power to tax federal agencies. Finally, there was Webster's spectacular and nearperfect success in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), where he advanced a near-exclusionary view of the federal commerce power while reconciling this at the same time with the local police powers of the states, a position almost, but not quite identical with that adopted by Marshall in his opinion. Three or four things, the author makes clear in one place or another , accounted for Webster's extraordinary influence in the formulation of constitutional doctrine. First, he was a confirmed Lockean liberal with a profound respect for the sanctity of private property and contract rights, a position which Marshall and Story echoed almost exactly in their opinions. Second, again luce his great judicial counterparts , he saw in the doctrines of national supremacy and broad construction instruments both for translating the burgeoning American sense of nationhood into reality and for advancing the interests of property and business as well. Third, Webster more than any other great lawyer of the day was also a powerful national political figure—congressman , senator, and Secretary of State—so that he came before the Court with a kind of double prestige that few of his contemporaries could hope to equal. Finally, there was Webster's brilliant mind, his extraordinary capacity for legal analysis, and his brilliant forensic powers. All this combined to make him, in the author's words, "the leading lawyer of his generation," and "one of the most important in the nation's history." The author's argument, nicely marshalled to support this conclusion, is a conclusive one. Alfred H. Kelly Wayne State University Bhck Abolitionists. By Benjamin Quarles. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Pp. x, 310. $6.75.) In this volume Professor Quarles provides the most complete analysis thus far written on black abolitionism. In one sense the book is a portrait gallery describing the activities and attitudes of prominent blacks such as Robert Purvis, James Forten, Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, John B. Vashon, Martin R. Delaney, Samuel Cornish, and Charles Remond. However, in some parts of the book Quarles treads familiar paths. For example, his analysis of the unenlightened racial attitudes of many white abolitionists is quite similar to the previously published works of Leon Litwack and William and Jane Pease. Even so, Quarles provides much useful new evidence which serves to buttress the conclusions of earlier writers on this point. Quarles also breaks new ground. His analysis of the attitudes of free book reviews275 Negroes in the North toward abolitionism is especially striking. He points out that many blacks lacked a "wül to activism and a full readiness to risk personal assault." In Philadelphia, which had a black population of approximately thirty thousand only four hundred Negroes actively supported antislavery publications—white or black. "Their bystander behavior," Quarles points out, "was a form of survival insurance in a social order that denied them legal and political equality." In addition , Quarles points to the existence of "intraracial color prejudice" based on "complexional distinctions." He also notes that some northern free Negroes, had they been plantation masters, "would make the blood fly from their slaves." In other words, Quarles avoids oversimplification in analyzing the diversity of attitudes among human beings regardless of race. In this respect, Quarles's approach invites comparison to the attitudes of Negroes Richard Wright brilliantly depicts in Black Boy. The major emphasis in Quarles's book is placed, and rightly so, on the outstanding contributions made by Negroes in arousing northern antislavery sentiment. EspeciaUy important were the narratives written by escaped slaves. Most northerners, Quarles observes, got their impressions of slavery through these narratives. At no time in our history, Quarles writes (with tongue in cheek if I interpret him correctly), have "Negroes . . . ever experienced less difficulty in getting published ." Slave narratives, in combination with other factors, helped to produce a dramatic change in the North toward abolitionism and slavery during the 1850's. In fact, one of Quarles's most compelling chapters deals with northern reactions to the fugitive slave...