John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS81 John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65. By William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Pp. 478. $34.95.) Only John Mercer Langston's autobiography, published in 1894, has until now told his unusual story. The son of a Virginia slaveholder and his freed slave, Langston became an Oberlin-educated lawyer and politician in pre-Civil War Ohio. In this volume William and Aimee Lee Cheek explain the forces that shaped this proponent of black education, antislavery agitator, Republican party organizer and minor officeholder, John Brown associate, recruiter of black Union troops, and first president of the National Equal Rights League. A planned second volume will deal with Langston's postwar career when he served as a Union League organizer, freedmen's educator, congressman, and diplomat. Drawing on the wealth of recent research on black Americans, as well as manuscript and newspaper collections, the Cheeks have completed a sophisticated, compelling portrait of their subject. While they make some shrewd speculations about Langston's psychological makeup, they explain him chiefly through contrasting the social and cultural milieus in which he matured. Describing how the orphaned Langston was raised in both black and white households, in rural and urban areas, in negrophobic Cincinnati as well as abolitionist Oberlin, they argue that Langston's life centered around the conflicts he felt between his black and white heritages. Frustrated in early manhood by the limit to his ambition imposed by race, he became an advocate of emigration, which he justified as necessary for blacks to achieve identity and self-respect. But, reassured by his ability to surmount racial barriers and the growing antislavery sentiment in the Western Reserve where he made his home, he quickly moved to a political integrationist stance. He came to see himself as a bridge between whites and blacks, uniquely able to communicate with both, and, because he was willing to share rights with all, a truer American than most others. Refusing to apologize for his race, he constantly reminded whites that they, as well as blacks, were victimized by slavery and racial injustice. Through courageous self-assertion, which he practiced himself, he expected blacks to advance and overwhelm white opposition. The Cheeks' portrayal of Langston takes issue with a number of generalizations about Northern black activists made by William and Jane Pease in They Who Would Be Free (1974). The Peases argue that such people were typically failures, alienated from the black masses, bickering among themselves, fractious and dissatisfied, all due to their powerlessness to challenge prejudice effectively, improve economically, and break free of white abolitionist manipulation. In contrast, the Cheeks assert that Langston felt empowered by his education, believed (with 82CTVTL WAR HISTORY some justification) that Ohio blacks were improving financially and socially, and confidently foresaw that black actions in resisting the Fugitive Slave Law, pressuring the Republican party, and joining the Union Army would help define the future of blacks in America. If black leaders sometimes disagreed over strategy or were more bourgeois than their followers, such was typical of white leaders as well. Leaders like Langston, according to the Cheeks, understood the difficulties they faced, expecting and accepting the slow pace of change. They, not white abolitionists, were setting the terms of black freedom and citizenship. The issue of the nature of black prewar leadership cannot be resolved by a single biography. Yet in showing the need to correlate leaders' positions with their changing individual circumstances and diverse backgrounds , the Cheeks are preparing the way for more complex generalizations about black elites. The analysis of Langston's life still poses some problems, however, in part because the Cheeks allow Langston's positive self-assessment to stand in lieu of a more substantive evaluation of his effectiveness. How black activism affected the Ohio Republicans remains insufficiently documented, and Langston's efforts to recruit ordinary blacks for the army needs to be placed in a larger, comparative context to be meaningful. While the authors describe the occupations, property holdings, and institutions of Ohio's free blacks, they do not develop a sense of black community structure nor do they show where a person like Langston—with so...