A Note on Elkins and the Abolitionists

A NOTE ON ELKINS AND THE ABOLITIONISTS Alleen S. Kraditor Of the varied interpretations of the American abolitionists during the past decade, one of the most interesting appeared in a book dealing primarily with another subject. The volume, Shvery, by Stanley Elkins,1 attracted attention in the historical profession for its bold suggestion that the "Sambo" personality was not simply an invention by racists to justify the enslavement of Negroes, but that the position in which the Negro slaves in the United States were placed did in fact create childlike and servile personalities in many of them. The suggestion was so provocative that reviewers paid relatively little attention to the other principal thesis of the book, a novel interpretation of the abolitionists. Although this thesis is supported by scanty evidence, it has been adopted and expanded in a volume recently published2 and the sections that deal with the abolitionists have recently been republished in two books of readings widely used in college history courses.3 Elkins contrasts the structure of American society with the structure of British society in the middle of the nineteenth century, and he finds that by then the power of many American institutions had melted away. The church had broken into denominational fragments. The legal profession was not the strong institution it was in England. Political parties were dissolving and changing their forms. Old classes were declining and new ones rising. The result, according to Elkins, was that traditional institutions were so weak, fragmented, and shifting that Americans of that day easily imagined that institutions as such 1 University of Chicago Press, 1959. 2 George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War (New York, 1965), a study of the impact of the Civil War on a small number of northern intellectuals, including some abolitionists. Those sections that discuss abolitionists are essentially a gloss on the Elkins text, and the author makes what I believe are the same methodological errors. See James M. McPherson's review of The Inner Civil War in Civil War History, XII (1966), 67-69, for a cogent critique of those errors. 3 Hugh Hawkins (ed.), The Abolitionists (Boston, 1964); and Richard O. Curry (ed.), The Abolitionists: Reformers or Fanatics? (New York, 1965). 330 were not necessary to a society's stability. "In the America of the 1830's and 1840's there was no other symbol of vitality to be found than the individual, and it was to the individual, with all his promise , that the thinker, like everyone else, would inexorably orient himself ." Individualism, self-reliance, abstractionism, disregard of the responsibilities and uses of power—"Such was the state of mind in which Americans faced the gravest social problem that had yet confronted them as an established nation," slavery.4 Elkins seems unable to decide whether to blame the abolitionists for approaching slavery in this state of mind. On the one hand he argues that there were insufficient institutional arrangements within which they could have worked to rid the country of this problem in a gradual and peaceful manner. On the other hand he obviously disapproves of their alleged anti-institutional bias, of their seeing the question as "all moral," and he declares that there was in principle if not in fact, an alternative philosophical mode. Slavery might have been approached not as a problem in pure morality but as a question of institutional arrangements—a question of those institutions which make the crucial difference in men's relationships with one another. . . .5 The question is whether the abolitionists as a group did have an anti-institutional bias. Elkins prejudges the issue in his query: "Why should the American of, say, 1830 have been so insensitive to institutions and their function?"6 "The American" turns out, according to the evidence Elkins provides, to be a tiny group of Concord Transcendentalists and a handful of abolitionists, whose ideas and attitudes were uncharacteristic not only of the overwhelming majority of Americans but even of the majority of abolitionists. He discusses such Transcendentalists as Emerson and Theodore Parker and their refusal to use institutional means to effect reforms and to think in institutional terms,7 and he admits that "their relationship with abolition societies was...