Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert (review)

Kenyon Gradert's Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination offers a fresh look at "Puritan origins" narratives that took hold during the antebellum period by examining how and why abolitionist writers invoked the Puritan past. The Mayflower's mythic landing at Plymouth Rock launched enduring narratives of American exceptionalism, promoted in generations of scholarship and renewed in cultural memory in solemn intonations of "Pilgrim's pride" and millions of construction paper hand-turkeys. Boosters and critics of this narrative agree that it enshrines "traditional" values. But, as Gradert asserts, origin stories can "bolster a revolutionary vanguard as much as a reactionary rearguard" (6). The 1619 Project bears out that claim, with its call to "reframe American history" around the powerful image of a ship arriving at Jamestown "bearing a cargo of 20–30 enslaved Africans" as "the country's very origin"; so does the backlash against it, including the effort launched by the National Association of Scholars to "refute" its account of American origins and "provide broader pictures of American history," called—what else?—the 1620 Project. In turn, as the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe's "Our" Story: 400 Years of Wampanoag History exhibit exemplifies, the memory of Plymouth Rock need not enforce patriotic consensus. In Gradert's vivid account, abolitionists hailed "the Puritan spirit" as a discourse of spiritual liberty that not only legitimated dissent but also mandated revolt against tyranny and willingness (even zeal) to kill and die for a righteous cause. Puritan Spirits argues that this revolutionary abolitionist discourse of Puritanism has "bolstered a progressive politics of memory" (10), a counterpoint to "our usual memories of Puritanism as a conservative force for capitalism, prudery, exceptionalism, and empire" (6).

In the introduction, Gradert clarifies that Puritan Spirits is "not a study of 'the Puritan origins of abolition' but of the resonance of the Puritan past within the abolitionist imagination" (10). He curates a rich archive of antebellum writing about Puritans, but writings by Puritans and eighteenth-century post-Puritans mostly provide epigraph material; this is not a long history of Puritan or New England abolitionist rhetoric. Each of the six main chapters is a case study that clusters multiple figures together around a particular Puritan trope or aesthetic of "the abolitionist imagination" or a particular institutional site (the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society; the poetry column of the Liberator). Certain themes and images cross chapters, including the use of Cromwell and Milton as heroic types; the tensions between "imagined" or spiritual warfare and actual violence; the different invocations of Puritans by gradualists and immediatists, pacificists and militants (and how the same figures tacked between these positions); the vitality of abolitionist print culture; the reckoning with white writers' "Saxonism, New England chauvinism, and (by today's standards) retrograde conceptions of race, gender, and religion" (42). The book coheres less as an argument than as thick description of an "episode in a long battle over our memory of the Puritans" (5). Gradert's archive provides early Americanists with material that can enhance our approaches to the antebellum period and provide context for the stories we tell about Puritans and their influence in our scholarship and our classrooms.

Chapter 1 examines how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips invoked the Puritan past as a model of "spiritual heroism," casting radical abolition as redeemer in a providential narrative of American democracy in which "progress was inevitable yet revolutionary" (32). Gradert opens with the figure of John Brown, noting how frequently abolitionists used the word Puritan to praise him (17). As antislavery advocacy radicalized into "millennial zeal for America's bloodiest war," both Brown and Toussaint Louverture were hailed as "Cromwells"; Phillips deemed Louverture "a black Cromwell" (35). Claiming a revolutionary nonconformist heritage from their ancestors legitimated "a spiritual revolution that would salvage the heroic soul of democracy" (23). The chapter concludes with an intriguing reading of Emerson's "Voluntaries" as celebrating the leadership of the Black soldiers of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth, not just Colonel Shaw.

Chapter 2 discusses...