To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord (review)

In this illuminating local study, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis traces Henry Thoreau's evolution as an abolitionist in the context of Concord's antislavery movement. Though scholars have devoted time and energy to understanding the abolitionism of the town's two most famous residents, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, this is the first study of the activism that helped shape their ideas. Joining recent books on the antislavery movement like Julie Roy Jeffrey's The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Beth Salerno's Sister Societies (Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), Petrulionis views female abolitionists, including Thoreau's mother and sisters, and Emerson's wife and daughter, as the central figures in Concord's antislavery movement. She also sees Concord as an example of the transformation of antislavery sentiment in the north. The town's response to and participation in national events such as the Fugitive Slave Law and John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry radicalized relatives and neighbors previously divided on Garrisonian abolitionism, colonization, and racial equality.

The book's four chapters are organized chronologically, and Petrulionis begins with the founding of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, following a local appearance by the controversial Grimké sisters. Some of the town's female residents, most notably Mary Merrick Brooks, had already been active in the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society, and the female society continued the women's identification with Garrisonian moral suasion. The sixty-one charter members included Lidian Emerson and Cynthia, Sophia, and Helen Thoreau, and at least one African American, Susan Garrison. But Brooks, whose father was a slaveholder and whose husband opposed abolition, was the most important female activist in Concord. As Petrulionis notes, she "pursued Waldo Emerson with a vengeance, convinced that his backing would lend critical weight to the immediatist cause" (24). Brooks finally succeeded in 1844 when Emerson addressed an anniversary celebration of West Indian emancipation.

Petrulionis weaves the local story into the larger history of the antislavery movement, noting the embrace by Concord abolitionists (though certainly not the entire town) of disunionism in 1844. Personal connections to the national controversy served to radicalize the town's population, as when moderate politician Samuel Hoar went to Charleston, South Carolina, to appeal for the freedom of northern black sailors imprisoned in the state. When South Carolina officials shunned Hoar, Emerson and others were outraged at the insult. Most famously, the War with Mexico prompted Bronson Alcott, Henry Thoreau, and others to reconsider their relationship to a government pursuing what they viewed as immoral actions. As Petrulionis points out, Thoreau's "urgent call to public action," his essay "Civil Disobedience," came after "a decade of immersion in the vocal abolitionism of family and community" (69).

Thoreau's transformation into a radical abolitionist, which Petrulionis defines in part as willingness to use violence to oppose slavery, culminated in his vocal admiration of John Brown. Petrulionis does not see his support for John Brown as a contradiction of "Civil Disobedience"; instead she views both as examples of the uncompromising nature of Thoreau's stance, his "rebellious fervor" (142). Thoreau and other Concord citizens had been prepared for John Brown by the Fugitive Slave Law and Bleeding Kansas. Petrulionis dismisses the persistent legend that Thoreau sheltered fugitive slaves at Walden Pond, but she does note other examples of Concord's involvement, particularly in the escape of Shadrach Minkins. Concord residents such as Franklin Sanborn and Ellen Emerson also raised funds for antislavery emigrants to Kansas, and welcomed John Brown at the Town Hall. Petrulionis argues that Concord abolitionists had come to realize the "futility of moral suasion" and wanted action (100). After news of the raid spread, Thoreau was one of the first radicals to defend Brown, praising him as "a Transcendentalist above all, a man of ideals and principles" (135). He criticized as hypocritical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and...