In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Mary Grew had never undertaken to write the story of her life. But she did compose the history of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and participate in the process of collective reminiscences when she attended antislavery reunions. At the age of seventy-nine, she was still appearing and speaking in public. She told her old friend Elizabeth Gay in 1893 that she had gone to a meeting of Philadelphia’s New Century Club, “where reminiscences of Anti-Slavery days were told to a large audience by Dr. Furness, Harriet Purvis & myself. How new & strange & exciting it was to most of them! A very few of ‘the old guard,’ who survive unto this day, were there.”1 Grew had been elated by her reception. But the comment that her audience was unacquainted with the history that she and others were presenting hints at the obstacles facing abolitionists as they tried to keep their understanding of the past alive. It is hardly surprising that so few abolitionists took on the task of writing and publishing their life stories. Those stories were increasingly at odds with what Americans believed had happened in the decades leading up to and following the Civil War. And, because the act of recollection itself is necessarily shaped by all that happens since the events being described, the understanding of the past was transformed as each autobiographer attempted to make sense of his or her life. Even Samuel J. May had the uneasy sense that the long-sought goal of emancipation had results more limited than abolitionists had imagined during the many years of struggle. And as the significance of the past seemed to change, so too could the value of the individual life that had been devoted to that struggle. For all the reassessment that accompanied the process of composing life narratives, however, abolitionist autobiographers refused to accept the ever more negative evaluations of their movement and their own participation in reform. Increasingly regarding their work as unfinished, most maintained their basic commitment to a more just society and the values that had fueled their struggles against the political and cultural currents of the day. Their books explicitly or implicitly encouraged their readers to follow Afterword their example. African Americans who wrote about their own involvement in liberating the enslaved during the antebellum years insisted upon the agency of black people in the struggle for freedom.2 It must have been disappointing for them to learn how few people were interested in reading their books and to realize how many would rather read about quaint slaves and kindly masters than the evils of slavery. It was disheartening, surely, to see the reemergence of the old stereotype of abolitionists as misguided fanatics. It was hard to find the money to finance the publication of their recollections and then perhaps to lose it on the venture. It may have felt demeaning for some to peddle their own books. But for all the frustrations that writing may have entailed, they preferred those to silence. As this work has pointed out, however, it was not just changing cultural attitudes toward the past that made abolitionist autobiographies of so little general interest; it was also the ways in which they were written. Readers were not enthusiastic about the type of earnest personal accounts that abolitionists produced: autobiographies that put in “much of what [was] better left out” or appeared to be a “narrative of bitter theological [or other] controversies long since the driest of dust.” Over time, it became difficult to provide a story with content “not already familiar.” Even recollections focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe were seen as commercially “hopeless” by the mid-1890s, for her day had “gone by, and Mrs. Stowe does not stand in the minds of people as an oracle.” Instead, publishers, critics, and presumably readers hailed reminiscences that were “really charming,” with a natural, unassuming style, and writers who exhibited no “ill-disguised vanity.” Summing up a largely successful autobiographical manuscript, a Houghton Mifflin reader praised its picture of “remarkable social, business, religious and patriotic activity” and its avoidance of “moralizing.”3 The enthusiastic critical reception and impressive sales of Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 1898 autobiography reveal how far most other abolitionist memoirs diverged from cultural expectations. Higginson had been an active abolitionist before the war but had subsequently enjoyed a successful and long career as a literary man. He saw his experiences as an abolitionist as only a small piece of his life, now particularly...

Share