Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (review)

What happened to abolitionists after slavery ended? Or more aptly stated, after slavery ended, how did abolitionists explain what had happened? Julie Roy Jeffrey takes up these questions in Abolitionists Remember, a historical account that explores antislavery activists' autobiographical writings in the four decades after emancipation. While many Americans seemed eager to forget slavery through self-congratulatory beliefs about the nation's progress, abolitionists offered "alternative narratives" that intervened in the "cultural contest over memory and history" (3). In their late-nineteenth-century writings, former abolitionists assessed their achievements and tried to redeem themselves from being viewed as "meddlers" or "fanatics."

Abolitionists' postbellum efforts to memorialize their reform labor seemed urgent for a number of reasons. First, antislavery organizations and their publishing organs were disbanding, limiting the reformers' public visibility and means of expression. Second, many of the social changes that abolitionists had worked for were being questioned or undermined. Though chattel slavery had ended, it was replaced by forms of racial terrorism and southern peonage that some considered "the new slavery." Meanwhile, American audiences often preferred romanticized memories of slavery, as they proliferated in popular periodicals such as Harper's and Putnam's. Jeffrey's study aims to trace how abolitionists strategically represented their life histories in a time when "the racial, political, and cultural stakes of the interpretation of the past were so high in the post-Civil War years" (2).

Abolitionists Remember surveys nearly two dozen antislavery autobiographies. In the front matter, the book features a useful chronology of all the autobiographies under study, and readers may need to refer to this guide often. Within the body of the book, Jeffrey often omits texts' publication dates, authors, or titles, relegating such details to the endnotes. Seeing more of these details in the body would allow readers to keep track of the wide range of texts Jeffrey reviews.

The book's focus extends equally to the postbellum writings of well-known figures associated with antislavery organizations, such as Samuel J. May and Frederick Douglass, and to fugitive slaves whose escape alone is taken as proof of their antislavery sentiment. Jeffrey proposes a "generous definition of abolitionist to include all those who worked to eliminate slavery" (7–8). Because the author does not further delimit the category of abolitionist, readers are left to depend wholly upon the social labels and representations provided by the nineteenth-century writers. However, though Jeffrey intends the writers' words to speak for themselves, these self-definitions demand more attention. For example, though the abolitionist John Malvin was an officer of the Cleveland Anti-Slavery Society in the late 1850s, Jeffrey briefly notes that in his account in 1879, "[Malvin] never mentioned his connection to the organized abolitionist movement" (152). This observation could have further considered the implications of Malvin's omission in terms of self-identity, disclosure, and memory.

In other regards, however, Jeffrey's broad definition of "abolitionist" is more useful, especially because it includes female antislavery activists who may not readily have called themselves "abolitionists" or who remained in the shadows of more prominent male leaders. Jeffrey's interest in the gendered construction of abolitionist affiliation extends the research of her previous book, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (1998), which focused on the movement's more low-profile female participants, especially in small or rural locales. In the current volume, the number of male autobiographers outweighs female. As Jeffrey notes, female former abolitionists were less inclined both to publish postbellum accounts and to maintain their antislavery social connections. Of those women who did write autobiographies or attend antislavery reunions, some agitated for women's rights, supposing that with slavery abolished, gender inequality was the next wrong to be addressed.

Abolitionists Remember is structured according to three implicit principles. First, the book's five main chapters are arranged chronologically, spanning from the 1860s to the 1890s. Chapter one, "The First Recollections," focuses on Samuel J...