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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2015
The year 2015 marks not only the sesquicentennial of Appomattox but also the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Martin Duberman's anthology The Antislavery Vanguard, a collection of essays that set the agenda for an ever-expanding treatment of antislavery that continues to this day. In assessing these new additions to that literature, I began to think about the arc that historians of American abolitionism have traced in the past half-century, and the ways in which Kytle and McDaniel were inheritors and extenders of that historiographical revolution. Duberman defined his purpose as bringing together the work of historians bent on overthrowing a long-prevailing view of abolitionists as “meddlesome fanatics . . . wrapped in their self-righteous fury, who did so much to bring on a needless war.” He initially imagined a volume that would debate abolitionist virtue and vice but could find no scholars who would uphold the older stereotype. Instead, his contributors explored themes largely sympathetic to the reformers.
1 Duberman, Martin, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Martin Duberman, “Introduction,” in Duberman, The Antislavery Vanguard, vii–x, at vii. Duberman was reacting to the so-called revisionist historians of the Civil War era who saw the conflict as a “needless” bloodletting brought about by southern fire-eaters and irresponsible abolitionists fanning the flames of sectionalism. A partial rebuttal came as early as the 1930s in the work of Gilbert Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, who brought Theodore Dwight Weld, James G. Birney, the Tappan brothers, and the Grimké sisters into prominence and vastly widened the view of abolitionism beyond Boston and the vicinity. See especially Barnes, Gilbert, The Antislavery Impulse: 1830–1844 (New York, 1933)Google Scholar; and Barnes, Gilbert and Dumond, Dwight L., eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké 1822–1844, 2 vols. (New York, 1934)Google Scholar. However, the zeal of Dumond and Barnes in promoting the importance of “evangelical” abolitionism was at least partially motivated by a desire to undercut the importance of the Garrisonians, who bore the brunt of revisionist criticism and in the Barnes/Dumond version continued to be marked as harsh extremists.
3 Some key works include Du Bois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1935)Google Scholar; Aptheker, Herbert, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943)Google Scholar; Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York, 1947)Google Scholar; Woodward, C. Vann, Origins of the New South 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951)Google Scholar; Woodward, Vann, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Stampp, Kenneth M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction: 1865–1877 (New York, 1965); Litwack, Leon F., North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, 1961)Google Scholar; and Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1967)Google Scholar.
4 The list of significant works would dwarf this brief review but one need only consult the footnotes and bibliographies of recent contributions to the field to see just how wide-ranging and detailed the literature has become. As a side note, I might mention that intellectual lineages, though not really “schools” of interpretation, can be traced within the field. One example is this very review. The University of California, Berkeley, which for a time amassed a crucial cohort of scholars in the field of slavery and race, spawned not only my own work (under the mentorship of Stampp and Litwack) but also that of the mentors of the authors under review. McDaniel was a student of Ronald Walters at Johns Hopkins, who had studied with Winthrop Jordan at Berkeley. Kytle's mentor was Charles Capper, a Berkeley Ph.D. of the same generation, who studied with Henry May, a close friend of Stampp and a student of the broader religious dimensions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American culture. Of course, Berkeley was only one hotbed of reform scholarship.
5 Sylvan Tomkins, “The Psychology of Commitment: The Constructive Role of Violence and Suffering for the Individual and for His Society,” in Duberman, The Antislavery Vanguard, 270–98.
6 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Fugitive Slave Law,” available at www.rwe.org/vi-the-fugitive-slave-law-concord.html; Lawrence quoted in McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1989), 120 Google Scholar.