Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom (review)

BOOK REVIEWS269 Perry's Mission to Japan (1853-1854) as so many individual, even isolated chapters in American diplomacy. Nowhere are these chapters fused into some overaU "large" policy. Unlike later day historians, American decisionmakers have had to deal simultaneously with a vast range of problems which could not be disconnected. Scholars might also devote additional attention to studying the forces in opposition to "manifest destiny" during the mid-nineteenth century. Professor Goetzmann clearly did not attempt these tasks, but he is not unaware of them. He has written a masterful synthesis which adds lustre to the John Wiley series and contains many useful suggestions for further scholarship. Lawrence E. Gelfand University of Iowa Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom. By Merton L. Dillon. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. Pp. vi, 285. $6.75.) To historians, Benjamin Lundy has long seemed one of the most puzzling and seemingly contradictory of the abolitionists, a pioneer reformer working in the half-light of public hostility until 1830 but thereafter, until his death in 1839, retreating into the shadows of an ill-considered colonization project while younger men like William Lloyd Garrison seized the limelight . In the first place, the record is incomplete. Most of Lundy's papers were destroyed in the burning of Pennsylvania HaU in 1838, and historians have generally had to rely on Thomas Earle's useful but sketchy documentary compilation published in 1848. Lundy, moreover, was a complicated and paradoxical figure in his own right; a Quaker nonresistant with an ardent interest in politics and lobbying, a humanitarian who could refer to slaveholders as disgraceful whoremongers" intent on raising a crop of bastards for profit, and a strict equalitarian who nevertheless spent most of his life pursuing the chimera of colonization. In this meticulously researched and quietly reflective biography Merton DiUon succeeds in disentangling the various threads of Lundy's thought and in accounting for the apparent inconsistencies in his career. It was precisely Lundy's consuming hatred of the institution of slavery, the author argues persuasively , which prevented him from committing himself to any single method of abolishing it but instead drove him to embrace any cause promising, however indistinctly, to weaken its structure. Mr. Dillon's portrait iUustrates in turn the advantages and the limitations of biography as an historical tooL In the first half of the book, covering the years down to 1830, Lundy appears at the center of a geographical and ideological focus—in the middle of a small group of post-Revolutionary humanitarians in the nonslaveholding upland South and the newly setded West. These pioneer abolitionists were less influenced by the demands of a romantic and highly personal religion than by their Enlightenment heritage . "The abolitionists of the 1820's," Mr. DiUon explains, "stiU lived close enough to the eighteenth century to be able to conceive with the 270CIVIL WAR HISTORY philosophers of that age of a perfectly articulated world in which each person and institution occupied a place in the great chain of being and bore a necessary relation to the whole. They conceived of an orderly universe operating in accord with natural law. Therein lay much of thenhorror of slavery, for as an offense against natural law, slavery in their eyes destroyed the moral order of the universe." Seen from this new perspective Lundy's shifting attack on slavery, his refusal to appeal exclusively to guilt, his willingness to experiment, and, above all, his immovable faith in colonization became comprehensible for the first time. By 1830, however, Lundy's limited success in attracting national attention and winning converts had brought into the movement younger and more vigorous men untroubled by methodological doubts and concerned primarily with the moral dimensions of their task. After 1830 these newcomers usurped Lundy's place in the antislavery vanguard and came to regard his continuing interest in colonization as a withdrawal from the moral confrontation with the forces of slavery which they eagerly sought. Garrison was not the most charitable of critics, yet surely he was right in chastising Lundy for his obsession with founding a profit-making free labor colony in Texas. It is here that we sense fuUy die enormous distance, which...