Patterns of Antislavery among American Unitarians, 1831-1860 (review)

186CIVIL WAR HISTORY office, Knox was the only black named to the Republican state central committee. He functioned as an intermediary between the white power structure and the black community. His autobiography and the editorials in his newspaper reflect a racial and economic philosophy similar to that of Booker T. Washington, a philosophy which Knox developed and articulated before Washington's rise to power. Not surprisingly, the owner of the Indianapolis Freeman and the Tuskegee Wizard later became friends. The autobiography reveals Knox as a shrewd but vain man, impressed with his own rectitude and importance, who saw his life as a success story and himself as a kind of black Horatio Alger, but italso illuminates a variety of aspects of the black community and aspects of black-white relationships. The chief merit of this volume is found in the work of the editor. Gatewood's introduction and footnotes are the products of painstaking and meticulous research and perceptive scholarship. The introduction places Knox in the context of the times in which he lived and gives details of his life not depicted in the autobiography, including an account of the last three decades of his life. Emma Lou Thornbrough Butler University Patterns of Antishvery among American Unitarians, 1831-1860. By Douglas C. Stange. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977. Pp. 308. $15.50.) In proportion to their numbers, Unitarians probablyplayeda largerrole in the antislavery movement than members of any other Protestant denomination. But as Douglas C. Stange demonstrates in this study, the leaders of organized Unitarianism were as reluctant as the official spokesmen for other denominations to become directly involved in the slavery controversy; only with the failure of hopes for an extension of Unitarianism into the South and the massive shift of Northern public opinion inspired by the alleged "slave power conspiracy" of the 1850's did the antislavery forces gain direct influence in denominational circles. Most of the book is therefore taken up with an account of the individual activities of such Unitarian abolitionists as the two Samuel J. Mays, Lydia Maria Child, Maria Weston Chapman, Theodore Parker, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Students of the American antislavery movement will find little that is new or original in these accounts. Stange does make the provocative suggestion that a special inspiration for Unitarians who became radical Garrisonians was the failure of their own church with its stress on sober rationalism to provide an adequate outlet for the romantic and evangelical impulses of the age. Hence radical antislavery could serve as a surrogate church for those BOOK REVIEWS187 who were temperamentally disenchanted with conventional Unitarianism but unable because of their theological liberalism to join the evangelical mainstream. Unfortunately, however, this thesis is not pursued very deeply into the thought and consciousness of the principals. There is an account of the moderate antislavery persuasion of William Ellery Channing which has similar limitations. We fail to learn enough about Channing's broader world view to make his "philosophical " brand of antislavery fully comprehensible. In general, therefore, the book provides an adequate description of "patterns" of Unitarian antislavery but offers only a few glimpses into the intellectual, social, or psychological sources of the range ofattitudes and convictions surveyed. The study makes little contribution to the major effort historians are now making to reinterpret the antislavery movement in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of midVictorian religion and culture. The bibliography contains no titles published since 1970, and hence Stange is unable to draw on the new and highly relevant insights of such historians as Lewis Perry and Ronald Walters. If the work makes a useful contribution, therefore, it is more to the history of Unitarianism than to that of antislavery. George M. Fredrickson Northwestern University Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy 1798-1877. Introduction by Rear Admiral John D. H. Kane, Jr., USN (Ret.) Edited by William James Morgan, etal. (Washington: Department of the Navy, 1978. Pp. xxii, 944. $13.50.) This is an exasperating yet fascinating work because it is the autobiography of an exasperating but fascinating man, Admiral Charles Wilkes. Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy, has perhaps best described Wilkes as a "trouble-some man of a...