Morality and Utility in American Antislavery Reform (review)

184CIVIL WAR HISTORY Morality and Utility in American Antislavery Reform. By Louis S. Gerteis. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Pp. xvi, 263. $27.50.) Undergraduates often have difficulty understanding why fiery Gerrit Smith posted bond for infidel Jefferson Davis. So have historians. In his most recent book, Louis Gerteis attempts to describe how James Stewart's Holy Warriors became John G. Sproat's Best Men, and argues forcontinuity in the thought of the antislavery forces. The seeming contradiction between their prewar crusade for black freedom and postwar indifference to black rights is actually just two sides of the same coin that flipped, as his title suggests, between morality and utility. This is a study ofthe antislavery movement in its political and legal context which traces the ways in which its anti-Southern themes and "practical side"were expediently appropriated by mainstream politicians whose parties were, in turn, transformed by liberal doctrines. Northern Whigs responded positively to the ideal of a state dedicated to moral and material progress, while antislavery Democrats met the demands ofmass politics by emphasizing equal rights and laissez faire. Uneasy with the necessary accommodation of slaveholders in the national parties, liberals, bound by a temporary marriage of convenience, found their voice in the new Republican party where both morality and utility played their roles. Behind their aggressive posture against slavery lay the Republicans' willingness to use state action to intervene in the relationship between labor and capital. To continue the parallel, Gerteis asserts there were two Civil Wars: the moral conflict to free the slaves ended early with the Emancipation Proclamation, while the utilitarian stage, the war to force the South into a productive free market network which ultimately became a struggle for national survival, was resolved only after a long, bitter conflict. Romantic reform died on the battlefield with hundreds of thousands of Americans. The Republican party proved only a fragile coalition, and after the war, old abolitionists felt little loyalty to the party of Grant and went their own ways pursuing black education and civil rights, showing interest in women's sufferage and anti-imperial movements. The liberal reformers did not change, the Republican party did. Still convinced that reform must come through moral suasion, they balked at the heightened statism implicit in Radical Reconstruction, and fell into despair at the failure of the freedman to embrace the work ethic. Abhoring the corruptive effects of Grantism upon public morality and the erosion oflaissez faire principles, liberals, sworn enemies of authoritarianism and centralization, chose the evil they knew and fostered a "spirit of magnanimity" toward the old rebels who, though still unreconstructed, had clearly capitulated to the new industrial order. Inevitably, Gerteis's analysis of antebellum reform, like those which BOOK REVIEWS185 have come before it, is a study of means and ends. Because he discusses antislavery in its broadest terms over a long period of time, he has a hard time sustaining a tight argument. Gerteis does include an excellent discussion of Lydia Maria Child, whose writing illustrates the power ofdomestic values translated into public policy, in addition to a fine synopsis of the development ofthe antislavery argument that swung between the demands of morality and utility of "creative destruction." Like the careers ofhis subjects, Gerteis's conclusion does not live up to its initial promise, and seems disappointingly vague. Reluctant to focus primarily on politics, Gerteis tries to relate the ascendency ofthe utilitaritarian aspects of antislavery over the moral to the developing sensibilities of the middle class during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the creation of private and public spheres. Romantic moral reform, he contends , retreated in the nonconfrontational realm of domestic virtue, while preoccupation with productive relations between labor and capital seized the public mind justifying competition and acquisition ofthe postwar era. Nevertheless, Morality and Utility is a fine addition to the literature ofthe middle period, a well researched and thoughtful book ofparticular interest to the nineteenth century specialist. Barbara L. Bellows Middlebury College Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean . By Alfred N. Hunt. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Pp. 196. $25.00.) In a wide-ranging study...