Morality and Utility in American Antislavery Reform by Louis S. Gerteis (review)

SHORTER BOOK REVIEWS Louis S. Gerteis. Morality and Utility ill American Antislavery Refomz. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. xvi + 263 pp. On first reading, this book frustrates even the most sympathetic reader. Yet much the same can be said of the greatest works in American studies. For all the lip-service to his importance, P.O. Matthiessen has received few direct responses to his analysis of the American Renaissance, at least in part because it is such a demanding book to plow through. I remember many fellow graduate students fretting over Perry Miller, worrying about why they simply were not "getting it." Most recently, I asked some students to read a bit of Feiring on Edwards. Wails of dejection filled my ears for weeks after. Is Louis Gerteis to be placed in the category of "impenetrable but worth the trouble?" Or is he making some simple points about antislavery ideology which are placed in a wash of social science terminology, ever to come out soiled? Gerteis begins the book by arguing that the ideology of the revolution mattered to figures in the antebellum anti-slavery movement. For these figures, the key issue in the revolution was the struggle between liberty and property, between those who claimed that freedom must yield to the rights of ownership and those who said that all property rights must be contained under the roof of freedom. For Wendell Phillips and other opponents of slavery, the movement needed a constitutional argument which countenanced the existence of slavery as a matter of positive local law, but which carefully circumscribed it within a broader realm of freedom. In short, anti-slavery advocates had developed a nineteenth-century containment theory. Here, most clearly, Gerteis argues that utilitarians insisted that moral questions about slavery must be separated from strictly legal concerns, while moralists viewed slavery as but one piece of the corruption of this world, which their post-millennial, perfectionist vision would clear away. Advocates of the utilitarian constitutional position insisted that a morality-based legal 276 Shorter Book Reviews argument would reduce law from its absolute and formal position to one in which relativism reigned. Pro-slavery advocates, they feared, could use this to their advantage, as certainly could opponents of emergent capitalism. Constitutional utilitarians found common cause with political economists, who also saw the necessity of isolating slaverywithin the modernizing market economy. Most significantly, key politicians latched onto the utilitarian argument, especially the fusionists Salmon Chase and Henry Wilson, who found Whig moralizing insufficiently hard-nosed to deal with the task at hand--the elimination of slavery. For Gerteis, the utilitarian strain of antebellum reform came to full flower in the 1850s, as the Republican party needed an effective ideological base from which to attack the slave power. In making this complex and, at times, unnecessarily opaque argument, Gerteis attempts to locate anti-slavery ideas in identifiable groups within the anti-slavery community. As one of his many achievements, Gerteis views the anti-slavery movement as a set of competing forces more complex than most historical accounts have indicated. His accounts of Ohio and Massachusetts politics reveal Conscience Whigs against Cotton Whigs, anti-slavery Whigs against anti-slavery Democrats, one set of individual loyalties against another. Three major camps among the opponents of slavery draw his most serious attention. First, his protagonists (defined less by his positive picture of them and more by the space he devotes to their purposes) are the hardnosed utilitarian types, most particularly Wendell Phillips, Salmon Chase, Henry Wilson, William Elder and Daniel Goodloe. Gerteis's perceptiveness is perhaps best judged by the fact that several of these figures have received recent, admiring biographies, in Chase's case, for the first time this century. At his best, Gerteis breathes life into these men and women, as in his extraordinarily perceptive treatment of Frederick Law Olmsted. Gerteis is, of course, well aware of countervailing tendencies within antebellum reform. Yet his analysis, in particular, of a second group, the perfectionist-based reformers in the burned-over district, is all but dismissive. Amazingly, Theodore Dwight Weld is not discussed; the only member of the evangelical crew who receives serious coverage is Gerrit Smith, who...