From Abolition to Equal Rights for All: The Making of a Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century (review)

John T. Cumbler examines a small core of New England abolitionists' radical efforts on behalf of antislavery and other reforms before and after the Civil War. He uses the biographies of two key figures, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch and Julia Ward Howe, to anchor his narrative. He incorporates other (largely famous) abolitionists, from Wendell Phillips to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to explore the Boston reform community from which Bowditch and Howe emerged and in which they continued to operate after 1865.

Cumbler scrutinizes the development of Bowditch's antislavery beliefs, which he argues stemmed from his belief in Lockean natural rights. Moreover, he explains, Bowditch and his fellow abolitionists believed that government should act on behalf of common people to safeguard these rights. Though they squabbled and even had serious falling-outs about how best to enact equality, Cumbler highlights how abolitionists operated as a tight-knit community in the face of widespread hostility. His narrative of how Howe moved from unhappiness within her marriage into engagement with and leadership within the Boston abolitionist community is compelling and is set up as emblematic of how many experienced conversion to the cause. However, disappointingly little attention is paid to the Howes' involvement with John Brown, particularly in light of Cumbler's argument that the 1850s emphasis on "increasingly male" (83) militancy left women out.

After the Civil War, Cumbler argues that Bowditch, Howe, Phillips, and other Boston abolitionists did more than just celebrate their achievement. Instead, he writes, they vowed to continue on "till every yoke is broken." (1) Bowditch, for instance, worked for women's admittance to the Massachusetts Medical Society and, later, the AMA. He and other "old abolitionist-alumni" (123) saw such advocacy, as well as their work for woman suffrage, tenement reform, and public health on the same terms as their prewar efforts. Cumbler does a good job of demonstrating how Bowditch and Phillips looked to an activist government to safeguard human rights. It is unclear how many abolitionists thought this way in Boston and beyond, but he makes the case that the belief was important nonetheless.

In their hopes that the government would secure rights for all, Bowditch and others were doomed to disappointment. Cumbler chronicles the postwar demise of radical reform. The hopeful early years of Reconstruction yielded to the ugliness of Jim Crow, Social Darwinism resulted in decreased empathy towards poor and immigrants, and the remnant who had taken part in the heady days of antislavery dwindled. Wendell Phillips was booed for his protest against lynching in the same Boston gathering spot where an audience had once cheered his antislavery stance. By the time of Howe's death in 1910, Cumbler argues, reformers had retrenched to a much more limited Progressive agenda.

Cumbler covers a lot of ground in this compact volume, and on occasions the reader wants more, especially on abolitionists' beliefs about and commitment to African American equality. But due to his chronological scope and his argument about abolitionist perceptions of an activist government, this is a thought-provoking work that should interest historians and many others.