The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké (review)

BOOK REVIEWS175 burg: "The blue line stopped, flailed ragged along its forward edge, and then reversed its flow." Or it might be a succinct assessment of one man, such as this comment on the Northern president: "Nothing pleased Lincoln more than to have an opponent think he was an idiot. It was like swiping somebody with a razor and then telling them to shake their head." Or the prose could be a simple rendition of one human story. Foote has obvious (and commendable) admiration for Jefferson Davis. Volume I begins with Davis' farewell speech in the Senate on the eve of war. Volume II opens with his 1862 inaugural address in Richmond. Foote fittingly ends Volume III—and the study—with a statement Davis made just before he died: "Tell the world I only loved America." Whether from a publisher's stinginess with review copies or from editors' apathy with widely spaced installments of an undocumented history, America's major historical journals largely ignored the first two volumes of Foote's study. The set is now complete. Foote no longer can be, or will be, ignored. He has provided a superb view of the forest rather than the usual and tiring look at a few trees; and he has done so in a writing style both fluid and appealing. The inclusion in this set of no less than 140 maps, each placed just where it is needed, is but a dividend to a sweeping history impressive to read and impossible to forget. James I. Robertson, Jr. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké. By Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin . (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1974. Pp. xv, 265. $11.95.) This admirable book presents an Angelina Grimké significantly different from the heroine of several previous studies of abolitionism and woman's rights. The story of her heyday as a lecturer in 1837-38 is retold here, but her lectures, and the controversies among clergymen and reformers that they excited, appear as a brief interlude in the struggles, never entirely victorious, of a gifted woman to win her own emancipation . This is a plausible, moving account of the career of an important reformer. It shows how much can be gained by avoiding the hackneyed questions (was Theodore Weld greater than William Lloyd Garrison ? was it wrong not to have singleminded concern for the slaves? who was a racist or a sexist?) that have dominated so many studies of the psychology and ideology of abolitionism. This is not a study that depends on new sources; its insights result from the author's curiosity and sensitivity concerning the intimate meanings of events and relationships . In the first and most successful section of the book Lumpkin skillfully 176CIVIL WAR HISTORY evokes patterns of family conflict—against a background of luxury, on the one hand, and the disciplining of slaves, on the other—that furnished many of the terms for Angelina's unending efforts at "emancipation ." The first of these efforts, beautifully described in these pages, was her conversion to Quakerism. We are also given a clearer sense than in any other book I know of the constraints and sufferings that could be imposed by family and friends on a young woman searching for vocation in antebellum America. The central chapters of this book, on Angelina's triumphs as a lecturer and subsequent engagement to Theodore Weld, add little to our knowledge of events that have previously been narrated many times. Although the book is in general uninformed by the historical scholarship of the past two decades, only in these chapters, which are less concerned with la petite histoire than with the public meanings of events, does this shortcoming have serious consequences. Even in the retelling of Theodore's epistolary courtship of Angelina, there are few insights. While taking Weld's descriptions of himself at face value, Lumpkin stresses the pain Angelina felt because of his harsh criticisms and the costs to her never robust self-confidence. This is interesting, but I miss any sense of the romantic exhilaration she enjoyed in subjecting herself to a fascinating, dangerous man whom she compared, in unpublished letters, to Byron's corsair...