Wendell Phillips, Social Justice, and the Power of the Past ed. by A J Aiséirithe and Donald Yacovone (review)

Students and scholars of the Civil War era are familiar with Wendell Phillips, the man called "abolition's golden trumpet." This impressive anthology does well to integrate his work not only as an advocate of abolition, but also as an activist for women's, immigrants', and workers' rights; a critic of corporate wealth; and an advocate of economic regulation. This is the first focused consideration of Phillips since James Brewer Stewart's Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero (1986). Despite a flurry of scholarship over the past three decades, Stewart's biography has aged well, and Wendell Phillips, Social Justice, and the Power of the Past is better seen as an extension of rather than a replacement for that work. Indeed, Stewart's voice suffuses this new volume, contributing to three of its twelve chapters.

The past few years have been fertile ones for antislavery studies, particularly for works of traditional political history. These recent studies, most notably James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2013) and The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (2014), focus more on action than on imagination, on political alignments over ideological transformations. Donald Yacovone's introduction to this anthology asserts the need for studies of ideology by noting, "Wendell Phillips reminds us … that antislavery agitation created the constituencies that empowered the politicians." As Phillips himself claimed, "Garrison made Lincoln possible" (5). In addition to historiographically contextualizing Phillips and previewing the volume's essays, Yacovone's introduction offers a lively, helpful survey of the reformer's life and work.

Those historians who have recently evaluated abolitionist ideology have largely looked beyond white abolitionist heroes like Phillips and instead argued that black activists were key in moving public opinion and generating change. This trend reached its most comprehensive and convincing manifestation in Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016). The essays in Wendell Phillips, Social Justice, and the Power of the Past, however, move in a different direction. Stewart's second essay in the volume tracks Phillips's notable commitment to racial equality but does not assert that Phillips needed black agitators to convert him to abolitionist thought or action. Ideas came from other corners.

W. Caleb McDaniel tracks how Phillips was influenced by transatlantic discourse and anxieties over democracy. Dan McKanan situates Phillips in the religious environment of antebellum New England, noting how the reformer effectively managed to sit at the precarious crossroads of orthodox and liberal Christianity. Two imaginative essays consider Phillips's relationship to the law. Dean Grodzins shows how Phillips resisted both revolution and pacifism through a nuanced understanding of the law. Michael Les Benedict argues that despite his repudiation of the Constitution, Phillips engaged in "constitutional politics," or the shaping of the constitutional policy through political agitation as opposed to legal action.

This volume follows other historians, including Sinha, who resist the characterization of abolitionists as bourgeois reformers and instead highlight the economic radicalism that suffused the antislavery movement. In 1872 Phillips wrote that "the Anti-Slavery cause was only a portion of the great struggle between Capital and Labor" (17), and two essays in the volume take up his opposition to corporate capitalism. Peter Wirzbicki offers a narrative of change, where Phillips's antebellum support of Chartists and other European radicals grew into postbellum denunciations of railroad barons as "the new enemies of democracy … comparable, he thought, to the power of antebellum slaveholders" (172). Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood explores "how much Phillips's ideology of social democracy drove his politics," particularly in his belief that Massachusetts governor Benjamin F. Butler "was the politician most likely to lead a movement toward a new political order where common people, black and white, and not the wealthy elite drove the political system" (182).

The most...