Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America by Susan Cooper Guasco (review)

BOOK REVIEWS FALL 2014 95 footnote Peter Bardaglio’s Reconstructing the Household (1995), which looks to the development of domestic relations law in the American South in the nineteenth century—with particular attention to slavery, the family, and the social order—and which posits, as Brandon does, the Civil War as a conflict over the proper ordering of the household. That being said, Brandon’s ambitious narrative successfully demonstrates that the trans-historical, “natural” family is a cultural illusion. Contemporary struggles over “family values” and homosexuals’ right to legally pursue marriage are simply the latest manifestations of America’s long-running battle over the meaning of family, its function in society, and the role of law in its regulation or protection. Jeffrey Thomas Perry Purdue University Confronting Slavery Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America Susan Cooper Guasco If students of the nineteenth century United States know anything about Edward Coles, it is that this slaveholder from Virginia freed his slaves aboard a flatboat in the middle of the Ohio River in 1819, and then served as antislavery governor of Illinois during a debate over the future of slavery in the state. Beyond that, Coles fades into undeserved obscurity. In this meticulous and robust biography, Susan Cooper Guasco demonstrates that Edward Coles represented more than an antislavery one-hit-wonder, and places him at the center of the development of what she calls an “antislavery nationalism” before the Civil War. Edward Coles was the fifth of five sons of a wealthy and politically connected slaveholding Virginia family. With little hope of giving all of his children an inheritance, Coles’s father sought higher education for his sons. At the College of William and Mary, Coles learned to cultivate personal and political friendships, and he learned moral philosophy, both of which would serve him well and shape his views throughout the rest of his life. Coles and his family were friends with James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe, among other members of the “first generation of natural aristocrats” (38). Dolley Madison was Coles’s cousin, and they maintained a warm correspondence. Susan Cooper Guasco. Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth -Century America. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. 265 pp. ISBN: 9780875806891 (paper), $28.95. BOOK REVIEWS 96 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Coles came away from William and Mary with his youthful uneasiness about slavery confirmed , and determined to move west and free the slaves he had inherited. However, at the urging of James Monroe, Coles accepted President James Madison’s invitation to become his private secretary. After the War of 1812, a bout of illness , and a diplomatic journey to Russia, Coles finally moved west, emancipated his slaves, and settled with them in Illinois. This part of the story most readers know, but Guasco offers more texture and complexity than most accounts, focusing on Coles’s subsequent uneasiness with the ambiguously proslavery views of many Illinoisans. Guasco handles the complicated history of slavery in Illinois deftly, if briefly. She gives readers a glimpse of a culture largely tolerant of smallholder slavery despite the Northwest Ordinance’s ostensible ban, while the larger issue of slavery’s westward expansion simultaneously initiated a heated political debate. Guasco’s account reminds readers that Illinois statehood, the Missouri Compromise, and the Illinois slavery debates all took place within a few years, and that the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys represented ground zero for the emergence of political antislavery in the early republic . Historians have often treated the Illinois slavery debates as an internecine quarrel based in the politics of personality in a largely party-less political culture, but Guasco re-positions these debates as central to the construction of Coles’s antislavery nationalism. In particular, Guasco notes that the most successful antislavery arguments drew on existing race prejudice and the safeguarding of white interests. Coles learned that to become truly national in scope, successful antislavery arguments could not echo abolitionism. After serving as governor of Illinois, Coles returned to Virginia to promote colonization and state constitutional reforms that would have loosened the elite planter’s grip on political power, potentially destabilizing support for slavery. Coles...