The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861 (review)

76CIVIL WAR HISTORY biased toward older works. Except for Albert Castel's 1992 book on the Atlanta campaign, I did not see another work listed that was published after 1988—this in a book bearing a 1994 publication date. This will not be the last word on the election of 1 864, but let us hope it is the harbinger of a return to political history on the part of new scholars in the field. The whole subject is ripe for study. Mark E. Neely, Jr. St. Louis University The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861. By Stanley Harrold. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Pp. x, 245. $29.95.) Stanley Harrold, recently the biographer of the poUtical aboUtionist GamaUel Bailey, usefully reminds historians of antebellum reform that a number of Northern abolitionists left the comfort of middle-class parlors tojoin coadjutors in the South and risk violence, imprisonment, and death in efforts to free blacks from slavery. In this concise volume, Harold argues forcefully that aboUtionism must be viewed from the perspective of the contested Southern borderlands. It was in northern Kentucky that the aboUtionist hero John G. Fee preached the antislavery gospel and Cassius M. Clay and John C. Vaughan advocated the freesoil poUtical cause; it was in northern Virginia that Eli Thayer and John C. Underwood endeavored to introduce free-labor colonies as a moral and material antidote to slavery. If one is willing, as Harrold is, to include Washington, D.C, within the Southern borderland, then the labors of GamaUel Bailey and Daniel R. Goodloe can be added to the list of Southern abolitionists. What is important for Harrold is that these Southern aboUtionists worked closely with Northern aboUtionists. Through the intersectional interaction that resulted from this collaboration, the radical social effects of aboUtionism continued into the 1850s to threaten the equiübrium of Southern slavery and to animate abolitionists in the North with revolutionary images of white emancipators and black Uberators poised in the South to upüft the oppressed and purge the nation of slavery's sin. Harrold argues that historians in recent years have neglected this Southern perspective, that they have severed the aboUtionists from their experiences with slavery as a concrete reaUty and deflated their radicalism into a self-absorbed, provincial, middle-class quest for self-control. Certainly, as Harrold's treatment of the intersectional interaction among aboUtionists vividly illustrates, the experiences of aboUtionists in the upper South intensified the sense among Northern reformers that the South offered a broad field for their missionary labors. Readers wiUjudge for themselves whether the abolitionists' capacity to perceive enslaved blacks as worthy objects of benevolence required close contact with or scrutiny of the conditions and culture of slavery—that is, BOOK REVIEWS77 whether intersectional interaction rendered the abolitionists' experience with the social relations of slavery concrete. Perhaps because Harrold has uncovered no new veins ofaboUtionist activity in the South he tends to overemphasize the Southernness of several of his leading figures. Thus, Bailey moved south, to Washington, D.C, only after the poUtical successes of reformers created an antislavery party in Congress. Goodloe moved north to Washington, D.C, and later joined Bailey as editor of the National Era but did not return to his native North Carolina until after the Civil War. Vaughan, too, moved north from South Carolina to Cincinnati and successfully established the Louisville Examiner on antislavery principles in the mid-i840s. But by 1848 Vaughan had removed to Cleveland as an influential antislavery editor, and he laterjoined Joseph Medili on the Chicago Tribune. Harrold complains that historians of abolitionism have tended to make too much of their subjects' sectarianism and to exclude from the ranks of genuine reform political figures like Salmon P. Chase. But the implications of this critique for the Southern borderlands are not followed very far. When Chase took the lead in organizing the Southern and Western Liberty party convention in 1845, the people he hoped to draw to the antislavery cause were those who could distinguish politically between their interests and the interests of a slave power. When Francis P. Blair, Jr., appealed to the same groups in the 1850s and gained the support ofElihu Burritt, Gerrit...