Moral Choices: Memory, Desire and Imagination in Nineteenth Century American Abolition (review)

BOOK REVIEWS281 Godwin, who gloried in our physical subjugation of "inferior" and "decadent" peoples, at Kelley's hands become advocates of an "idealistic" and "noncoercive philosophy" that welcomed all our continental neighbors to join the Union. We are asked to believe that Southern Whigs believed ante-bellum Southern culture "to be in opposition to everything America should be and should symbolizeto die world" (p. 208). The list of dubious generalizations could be extended. Nor is the book marvelously well written. While Kelley's writing is usually adequate and sometimes graceful, the manuscript is occasionally flawed by cliches and straining for effect. Presbyterians are too often "rugged," Scotch-Irishmen "prickly" and "hard-bitten," democrats "stiff-necked," mass politics "gritty" and "sweaty," too many visions are "bold visions," whetiier of "what America should become" or the devil knows what else. Lee Benson's 1961 interpretation is not simply new or different; it came "from quite a different line of country" (p. 9). The ethnoculturalists' fixation with die "symbolic" or what they call the "cultural" content and implications of politics puts me in mind of the fictional patient with a sex problem, who, when his analyst hands him a blank sheet of paper, expresses surprise that his doctor would give him pornographic material. Kelley and the otiiers have performed a useful service in calling attention to the roles played by edinicity, religious affiliations, convictions, and values, reference groups and their feelings toward one another, in American life and politics. There is much question nonetheless that "cultural patterns" have precisely the effect on individuals or on politics and parties, particularly in their policy making aspect, that the ethnoculturalists attribute to them. The great weakness of Kelley's book is not so much that his version of the newviewpoint is no more persuasive than are those of any other of its exponents but that his attempt at a synthesis does not come off. The Cultural Pattern of American Politics offers little that is new or stimulating to historians and diesis ridden as it is, is likely to be neither persuasive nor attractive to general readers. Unlike Michael Holt's recent The Political Crisis of the 1850's, which if not always persuasive is tightly reasoned and often original, Kelley's book does little more than display its author's erudition but to no clear or particular effect. Our disappointment is heightened by our knowledge of Kelley's high intelligence and wide learning. Edward Pessen Baruch College City University of New York Moral Choices: Memory, DesireandImagination in Nineteenth Century American Abolition. By Peter Walker. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Pp. xxii, 387. $24.95.) Moral Choices' table of contents forewarns of an unusual book. It is dominated by three biographical essays of unequal lengths on the 282CIVIL WAR HISTORY Virginia-born Garrisonian Moncure Conway, the freesoil feminist editor Jane Grey Swisshelm, and die best known of black abolitionists, Frederick Douglass. A final chapter then develops loosely-related treatments of Utopian sexual theorist Henry C. Wright, politician Salmon P. Chase and jurist Thomas Cooley. A more diversified assembly of abolitionists is hard to imagine, and the volume which brings them together subordinates most of the standard categories of analysis common to recent scholarship on abolitionism. The movement's factions, its strategies and tactics, its broad social basis and its shared religious creeds interest Walker only secondarily. As a biographer he is no less conventional. Absent is any drive to achieve chronological completeness, or to suggest sustained relationships between his subjects' public actions and the narrative of sectional conflict itself. Instead, Moral Choices is a brilliantly conceived set of studies which focus intensely on the particular, seeking primarily to understand why each main figure embraced abolitionism and what this commitment did to give each of their lives coherence. Full of fresh insights, provocative methods and strong prose, this book should stimulate everyone who finds biography revealing and challenging. It should likewise stir the minds of all who study abolitionism, or who pursue related interests in ante-bellum Yankee culture. Walker's explanations of method deserve some quoting and summarizing: "I have gone beyond the moral slogans," he explains, "but have not sought perversity or neurosis or...