Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era

Abstract

On the cusp of the American Civil War, a new generation of reformers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Robison Delany and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, took the lead in the antislavery struggle. Frustrated by political defeats, a more aggressive Slave Power, and the inability of early abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison to rid the nation of slavery, the New Romantics crafted fresh, often more combative, approaches to the peculiar institution. Contrary to what many scholars have argued, however, they did not reject Romantic reform in the process. Instead, the New Romantics roamed widely through Romantic modes of thought, embracing not only the immediatism and perfectionism pioneered by Garrisonians but also new motifs and doctrines, including sentimentalism, self-culture, martial heroism, Romantic racialism, and Manifest Destiny. This book tells the story of how antebellum America's most important intellectual current, Romanticism, shaped the coming and course of the nation's bloodiest - and most revolutionary - conflict.

“It is to a great extent, anew book”: Josiah Henson, John Lobb, and the challenges of white editorship of Black texts

“…Unlike the authors of minstrel shows, novels or songs focusing on American slavery, Lobb had access to an authentic voice from slavery that he could amend to his own advantage. 19 Rohrbach's concept of marketability 'for the real' is clearly demonstrated through this romanticized story of abolition, and Henson himself. 20 In 1876-1877, Henson travelled to the British Isles to pay off debt on his mortgage (accumulated through his work as a community activist in Canada) and he travelled around the country to raise the money.…”

“…24 In just four weeks, over 20,000 copies were sold, which doubled by the end of the second month. 25 The volume was translated into Welsh, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, French, German and 8 Norwegian. Together with the Young People's Illustrated Edition, over 250,000 copies of Henson's works were sold in less than three years.…”

John Witherspoon, the Scottish Common Sense School, and American Political Philosophy

“…Its particularly common to link Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin to Scottish influences both because of its famous sentimentalism and because we know that Stowe read some Scottish philosophers as a young woman, in part because her father, the incredibly influential evangelical minister Lyman Beecher, was strongly influenced by Common Sense philosophy. 31 Harriet's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was perhaps the best-known preacher in Civil War-era America, famous for his anti-slavery radicalism and for his sentimental theology that focused on a loving Christ, rather than a stern patriarchal God.…”

Black Abdiel and the Higher Law: James Monroe Whitfield vs. the Fillmore Faction

“…All employed the formal resources of English Romanticism in a new Abolitionist project: "Frustrated by political defeats, especially the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, they embraced a wide range of romantic motifs and doctrines, from immediatism, perfectionism, and sentimentalism to self-culture, martial heroism, romantic racialism, and even Manifest Destiny." 32 We could add Phillips and Richard Realf, and further Black Romantics like Harper, Whitfield, and William Wells Brown. 33 By crushing the Romantic optimism of Forties Abolition, the Fugitive Slave Act spurred the darker but no less Romantic Black prophetic fire of the Fifties: a bruised but eloquent subjectivity recalling proto-Romantic Milton after the Restoration, the English Romantics after the Congress of Vienna and Peterloo, and the European Late Romantic nationalists after the defeats of 1848.…”