Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS75 Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870. By Lawrence J. Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pp. xi, 344. $37.50.) For the past quarter of a century historians have relied upon an assortment of psychological perspectives in their endeavor to understand the abolitionist commitment to reform. Abnormal childhoods, status anxieties , messianic complexes, and of course Oedipal fixations have all figured at one time or another in accounting for abolitionist behavior. Recently , Robert Abzug, Lewis Perry, and Peter Walker have successfully applied psychological theory to their examinations of individual activists . Lawrence Friedman's fascinating new book is among the first to offer a comprehensive study of the immediatists that is structured around an analysis of the social psychology of reform. Friedman describes the first generation of immediatists as "gregarious saints"—activists who evinced a tension between the goals of communal fellowship and private piety. Around these related themes—collective versus individual action as well as national versus local orientation and unity versus disorganization—Friedman deftly constructs his interpretation of abolitionism. Three of the chapters examine the clusters (or "sanctuaries" as Friedman also calls them), within which immediatists operated. Although many groups constituted "a world in ourselves and in each other" (the phrase is Charles Folien's), Friedman analyzes the formation and disintegration of three of the most important factions: the Boston clique led by Garrison (insurgents), the New York City circle led by Lewis Tappan (stewards), and the upstate New York group that centered around Gerrit Smith (voluntarists). Friedman makes no extravagant claims for the influence of these groups on American society; indeed, he reminds us that immediatists were at first "a subculture within a subculture." He provides a multifaceted analysis of social characteristics, ideology, and group dynamics: whereas the insurgents spurned orthodoxy for liberal religious precepts and rebelled against the benevolent empire, the stewards were mainly Congregationalists and Presbyterians active in missionary enterprises; the voluntarists were nonsectarian, localist in outlook, and supported political agitation. More enlightening is Friedman's insightful discussion of the role of social ritual and ideology as forces of both cohesion and fragmentation. Camaraderie and intimacy, Friedman demonstrates, often generated factionalism and hostility; the commitment to voluntarism logically forced some immediatists to expand their localist perspective at the expense of group cohesiveness. Gregarious Saints also elucidates three issues which helped to transform each of these "sanctuaries": the incorporation of women into the reform community, the concomitant failure to conduct a successful biracial experiment, and the advocacy of "righteous violence." Although these questions are not new to students of antebellum reform, Fried- 76CIVIL WAR HISTORY man's analysis consistently pushes beyond older categories of interpretation . His discussion of relationships between the sexes stresses changes in the concept of the Woman's Sphere and the improved networks of communication within organizations. His interpretation of the association between white abolitionists and free blacks rests upon a portrait of the immediatist as a paternalistic "white evangelical middle-class missionary " who regarded blacks in terms of a child/savage dichotomy. The endorsement of violence, according to Friedman, reflected the failure of the missionary perspective and signified a search for fellowship outside of the confines of immediatist clusters. While Gregarious Saints fulfills much of the potential of applying social psychological insight to historical settings, the book also reveals some of the limitations of such an approach. Historians still have not addressed satisfactorily the causal relationship between individual behavior and the broader cultural milieu in effecting change. In the example of the immediatists, the internal dynamics of a particular cluster, however significant, tends to obscure the active, often transatlantic, cross-fertilization of ideas and interests between activists. Historians also remain bedeviled by the problem of origins, in this case the timing of the rise of immediatism in America. Friedman suggests that the adoption of immediatism stemmed from a critique of the American Colonization Society first articulated in the 1820s. But this cannot explain why the call for immediate emancipation erupted in America in 1830 and not earlier. Gregarious Saints is a provocative work based upon extensive research in manuscript sources; it is the first to utilize fully the Blagden collection located at Harvard University. Friedman's book offers...