Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (review)

"The responsibility of the memory you assume, like the guilt you accept," the writer Christopher Hitchens once asserted, "must be your own." Hitchens's aphorism aptly describes the dilemma the people of Massachusetts—and the entire United States, really—faced in the decades before the Civil War as Americans struggled with the legacy of the American Revolution and its inextricable connection to the pernicious institution of slavery.

Margot Minardi's fascinating and complex book, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts, is premised on the idea that our memory of the past profoundly shapes "what sort of future to call into being" (5). Although this may seem a truism, her work illustrates Samuel Johnson's dictum that humanity more often needs to be reminded than instructed. As she states in the introduction, Making Slavery History examines how the people of Massachusetts "thought about who makes history . . . and how their answers to that question shaped their ideas about what sort of future to call into being" (5). Minardi's chief argument is that after the Revolution, Massachusetts literally and figuratively made slavery history by stressing an emancipationist past, if you will, of the Bay State and the American Revolution. In short, if historian David Blight's Race and Reunion emphasized how the nation's willful historical amnesia of the emancipationist memory of the Civil War had adverse and tragic consequences for postwar American race relations, it is Minardi's point that by stressing Massachusetts's emancipationist past, the people of that state, including women and African Americans, contributed in no small measure to the eradication of slavery throughout the United States.

In five well-argued chapters, Minardi demonstrates, first of all, that the people of Massachusetts came to believe their state was distinctive from others because of its antislavery past, an abolitionist past, perhaps, which occurred as a result of, as Jeremy Belknap said in letters to Judge St. George Tucker of Virginia, "publick opinion" (19). "The discourse of public opinion thus assimilated abolitionism into the progress of civilization" (39). Of course, as Minardi shows, this is not to say that in Massachusetts there was not a good deal of historical amnesia regarding African American contributions to the American Revolution, as the contributions of white men, such as Joseph Warren, were emphasized over those of Crispus Attucks. Although "a small presence in terms of numbers, a scorned presence in terms of law, and a subordinate presence in commemorative culture, people of color nonetheless were present, and present with a past" (63). With the rise of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s and against the backdrop of the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument, a monument that perhaps tamed the more radical possibilities of the American Revolution, more of an emphasis on the central role African Americans played in the Bay State's past was soon stressed. "If the monument-builders privileged the idea of history as a received narrative," Minardi astutely observes, "abolitionists perceived history as a story that was still being written—indeed, that they, through their activism, were in the process of writing" (94). Finally, what distinguished the 1850s from earlier decades, in Minardi's view, was that African Americans such as Crispus Attucks were now "being represented as actors in the American past," and this made possible the formation of a new American nation even as the old Union was threatened with dissolution (138).

A short review can hardly do justice to the richness of Minardi's book or the wide range of sources she consults and uses in constructing her narrative. Making Slavery History makes several important contributions to both the burgeoning field of memory studies and the Civil War. First, while there has been a plethora of books dealing with how the Civil War has been remembered—or forgotten—in American life, with all the tragic consequences that go along with such...