The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (review)

92CIVIL WAR HISTORY interviews to journalists, antiquarians, political activists and scholars. Together these accounts have given investigators of slavery vivid images of the harshness and humanity, slave rebelliousness and resignation that existed in the peculiar institution. Blassingame's introduction is a thorough analysis of the sources of slave narrative. He persuasively argues that we can put to good use the frequently criticized nineteenth-century fugitive slave autobiographies. Through meticulous research, Blassingame has managed to independently verify details in these narratives, thus demonstrating their value as historical sources. The introduction also gives a valuable discussion of the difficulties of using the WPA narratives. Compiled during the height of the Jim Crow era, often by whites clearly unsympathetic to notions of black equality, these narratives often suffered from the biases of their recorders who were often anxious to project slavery in a sympathetic light. The introduction provides a valuable point of departure for historians interested in assessing different genres of slave narrative. The testimonies are divided into seven parts: Letters, 1736— 1864, Speeches 1837—1862, Newspaper and Magazine Interviews, 1827—1863, American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission Interviews, 1863, Newspaper and. Magazine Interviews, 1864—1938, Interviews by Scholars, 1872—1938, and Autobiographies published in Periodicals and Books, 1828—1878. Some of the people whose stories we get a glimpse of are anonymous figures whose memories are only preserved in short letters or brief interviews. Others are more familiar to students of American slavery, William and Ellen Craft, Henry Bibb, Sally Hemings and Solomon Northup, to name a few. Not only do the narratives paint incredibly rich portraits of the lives of slaves, they reveal much about the personalities of masters as well. Through the pages of Siaue Testimony, we see black and white, anonymous, famous and infamous, the people of the plantation South. By letting the slave present his world in his words, Professor Blassingame has given the student of slavery an opportunity to gain an empathetic understanding of ante-bellum slave life. Siaue Testimony will be a convenient and valuable way for scholars studying slave society to keep in mind the human dimension of history. Robert J. Cottrol Emory University The Antishvery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830. By Ronald G. Walters. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Pp. xviii, 196. $11.00.) Students of the antislavery movement will want to read this book, BOOK REVIEWS93 but they will not find it to be a history of antislavery or any aspect of it as usually conceived. Rather, it examines the concerns of one set of ante-bellum Americans regarding, among other matters, antislavery tactics, religion and morality, sexuality, the family, the economy , and the Union. Abolitionists, the author shows, suffered doubts concerning American practices in all these areas. But for all his preoccupation with tension and anxiety, his major theme is consensus. Mr. Walters joins those who emphasize continuities, shared values, and mutual goals rather than their opposites. Here abolitionists do not appear markedly different from a great many other Americans sensitive to society's imperfections. Abolitionists too are found to have been all of a kind, despite their proclaimed differences and sectarianisms. The conflicts within the fraternity lacked the significance both contemporaries and later historians accorded them. In this assessment The Antishvery Appeal differs sharply with some signal recent scholarship, most conspicuously with Aileen Kraditor's Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, a work Mr. Walters says he admires but does not agree with (p. 153). The author's argument is supported by evidence culled chiefly from writings of the best known, most voluble abolitionists, some of them dating from many years after the end of their crusade. Thus the case is made. Yet the consensus view would be even more persuasive if the reader could forget that such was not the opinion held by abolitionists themselves and certainly not by either their contemporary foes or friends. Merton L. Dillon Ohio State University Toward a Patriarchial Republic: The Secession of Georgia. By Michael P. Johnson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Pp. xxiv, 244. $15.00.) Only a few volumes ago in Civil War History, William W. Freehling suggested in an essay review of George H. Reese (ed.), Proceedings...