Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era by Ethan J. Kytle (review)

As a collective biography after the manner of recent studies by John Stauffer, Leslie Butler, and Frederick Blue, Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era presents the antislavery activism and writings of five antebellum reformers—two black men (Frederick Douglass and Martin Robison Delany), two white men (Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson), and one white woman (Harriet Beecher Stowe)—as foremost among a group Ethan Kytle designates “New Romantics.” Descended from first-generation abolitionists, especially William Lloyd Garrison, as well as from transatlantic Romantic figures and early American reformers, the New Romantics combined the immediatism and perfectionism of these forebears with myriad other tactics to reinvigorate an abolitionist arsenal capable of confronting the increasingly hostile political climate of the 1850s. Kytle argues that through a romantically infused strategy of self-culture, romantic racialism, sentimentalism, martial heroism, and even emigrationist manifest destiny, these five reformers “framed their objections and justified their actions chiefly on romantic grounds” (7). The diversity of this cohort also reminds us that a great strength of the antislavery movement in the prewar decade was its forging of bonds across race, class, and gender lines. Romantic Reformers is informed by copious use of archival correspondence and a thorough immersion in historiography, recent critical biography, and literary scholarship. It is especially strong in capturing the ambivalence of these activists as they broke with Garrison and embraced a “higher law” doctrine harmonious with militant resistance.

Kytle examines the fraught nature of Transcendentalist Theodore Parker’s reflections on antislavery violence through the lens of his famous sermon, “A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity”; he proposes that Parker pragmatically opted for the permanence of a “higher law” rather than the transience of human-crafted edicts. Kytle contextualizes Parker’s romantic racialism as unfortunate evidence that the New Romantics occasionally bought into the notions of antebellum pseudoscience that posited particular personality traits as “race” dependent. Hence, Parker, whose racism has long been noted by scholars, believed that African Americans were by nature affectionate and meek, in contrast with Anglo-Saxon dominance and predisposition to violence in pursuit of liberty. This discussion would benefit from considering Parker’s disavowal of the theories and racism of Louis Agassiz, Harvard University’s premier zoologist and advocate of polygenism, especially in light of Agassiz’s chumminess with Parker’s fellow Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Where Parker’s evolution toward antislavery militance was deliberative, Frederick Douglass’s stride was more eager. Kytle considers Douglass a New Romantic mainly for his unshakable conviction in the democratic system and for his insistence on black self-help, including slave rebellion, as a revolutionary notion of romantic self-culture. In this regard, Kytle expands on recent studies that view Douglass’s advocacy of slave rebellion as evidence of an overall romantic project. In contrast to the New Romanticism of Parker and Douglass, that of Harriet Beecher Stowe is advanced chiefly through her sentimental novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Its demeaning stereotypes of black characters align Stowe with the romantic racialism of the other New Romantics; the novel’s “idealization of childhood” and Tom’s “religion of the heart” further reflect New Romanticism (117, 139). In contrast with Tom’s pacifism, George Harris’s recourse to violence as he escapes from slavery reflects Stowe’s vacillation, which she shares with Parker, over the legitimacy of violent antislavery action.

Turning to Martin Delany, Kytle effectively wades through the morass of Delany’s shifting antislavery politics and priorities. From his racist expulsion from Harvard Medical College to his commission as the sole black officer in the Union army, Delany is most a New Romantic in his unapologetic martial heroism. Although like Douglass he urges black self-help, Delany scorns Douglass’s confidence in the democratic system. By the 1850s Delany’s earlier call for slaves to take up arms had been replaced...