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Cross-posted from H-SHEAR@h-net.msu.edu (December 2003)
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SHEAR@h-net.msu.edu (December 2003)
Stanley Harrold. _Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington,
D.C., 1828-1865_. Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World
Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xv +
280 pp. Illustrations, notes, essay on sources, index. $69.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-8071-2805-8; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8071-2838-4.
Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Michael D. Pierson, Department of History,
University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Biracial Abolitionism in the Heart of Slavery's Republic
Stanley Harrold's new book continues his ongoing efforts to shift
the attention of abolition studies southward. While the people of
Boston, Peterboro, and points in between figure in this book,
Harrold's focus is on Washington, D.C., and there he finds a
surprising amount of abolitionist activity. By tracing the actions
of these borderland abolitionists, Harrold fashions three
challenging conclusions. First, studying these abolitionists
changes our perceptions of the entire antislavery movement,
especially if we have spent too much time thinking about the
Bostonians. Second, he posits that these men and women, by
operating in the presence of slavery's political elite,
significantly influenced sectional politics. Third, Harrold finds
in the abolitionist community of Washington, D.C., a significant
amount of interracial cooperation. The group, he writes, could only
function as it did if blacks and whites cooperated on relatively
equal terms. Nor was it just a marriage of convenience; Harrold
argues that the white and black abolitionists of the nation's
capital went beyond simple alliance or teamwork and actually forged
a "community." All of these conclusions warrant further
elaboration.
Before examining the book's analytical points, however, it is worth
noting the factual scope of the book. While it starts with the Gag
Rule debates and their context, it really picks up steam in the
1840s. There is an excellent chapter about Charles Torrey and
Thomas Smallwood's underground railroad in the nation's capital.
According to Harrold, it helped perhaps four hundred fugitives
between 1842 and 1844. Facing constant opposition, their efforts
eventually came to a crashing end amid a hail of slavecatchers'
bullets and Torrey's fatal imprisonment. Other chapters about the
_Pearl_ incident and Myrtilla Miner's school for African-American
girls offer arguably the best secondary accounts of those important
but neglected topics. As with the story of Torrey and Smallwood,
Harrold's chapters illuminate events and people who have previously
occupied a secondary place in the history of abolition. This is a
welcome change, and not just because it redresses historiographic
imbalances. Events like the _Pearl_ incident, in which blacks and
whites chartered a ship, docked it in Washington, loaded
seventy-seven fugitive slaves on board, and sailed for Philadelphia
only to be becalmed and captured at the last moment, cannot but
excite the reader. Such chapters are the stuff of successful
undergraduate classes. They are also enough to make even a seasoned
historian glad for the reminder that abolitionism was not all
writing, speaking, praying, and holding conventions.
Reclaiming such strangely neglected abolitionists and their actions
allows Harrold to argue for new understandings of the antislavery
movement. Over the course of three earlier books, Harrold has tried
to re-focus abolitionist historiography on the places where freedom
invaded slavery and vice versa. Whether it is his biography of
Gamaliel Bailey (1986), his monograph _Abolitionists and the South_
(1995), or his co-edited book of essays _Antislavery Violence_
(1999), Harrold locates abolitionists in places outside of the
Boston-upstate New York-Oberlin triangle. What he finds there
changes our picture of abolitionism. In the border regions,
abolitionist men are aggressive, not pacifist. Noting that Charles
Torrey and African Americans such as Thomas Smallwood assumed "that
they were tougher than the slaveholders" (p. 87), Harrold argues
persuasively that the war against slavery along the freedom-slave
border pushed abolitionist gender ideologies toward an "aggressive
masculinity" that had more in common with John Brown than William L.
Garrison. In addition, abolitionism in Washington, in contrast to
the North, was a more masculine community in terms of simple
demographics; obviously, women played important roles, but they were
not the majority that they represented farther north.
Harrold claims that the abolitionists in Washington made a direct
impact on sectional politics. Rather than a group of thinkers who
indirectly instigated political conflicts, the abolitionists of
Washington dealt directly with antislavery congressmen and caused
southern politicians real angst. These abolitionist subversives, he
writes, made southern congressmen alarmed about the safety of
slavery in the United States. "The perception among southern
congressmen that slavery was under attack on its northern
periphery," Harrold writes of southerners negotiating the Compromise
of 1850, "had a significant role in the sectional crisis that led to
the compromise proposals" (p. 164). Certainly slavery and the slave
trade in Washington, D.C., were big issues in the Compromise of
1850. And who can blame the southern congressmen for being
concerned? In another dramatic attempt to help fugitives, white
abolitionist William Chaplin and a free black abolitionist, Warner
Harris, began to head north with two slaves, Allen and Garland.
These men were the body servants of Congressmen Alexander Stephens
and Robert Toombs of Georgia. The fact that they were apprehended
after a "desperate struggle" (p. 147) probably only partially
re-assured the two southerners. Harrold argues that by pressing
slavery at its political nexus, the abolitionists there convinced
"the South's white leaders that they had to take extraordinary
measures to defend slavery in the borderlands" (p. 256). When
Lincoln's election meant that steps to protect slavery in the
capitol could no longer be taken, secession seemed like a necessary
step to protect slavery from the aggressively antislavery community
in Washington. After all, would a Republican appoint a police chief
for the capital who would enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, as the
previous administrations had done? If they did not, who would guard
against the future likes of Chaplin, Torrey, and the host of African
Americans who labored with them? Harrold's study, by placing
abolition literally under the noses of the southern political elite,
re-invigorates the claim for abolitionism's importance.
Harrold's claim that there was an interracial community in
Washington is timely and controversial. Harrold argues that black
and white abolitionists did more than just work together towards a
common goal. He writes that white and black men and women formed a
community based "on physical proximity and on a shared opposition to
slavery" (p. 36). Drawing on sociology, Harrold defines this
biracial community as "relational," a community in which "empathy
and altruism predominate" (p. 38) rather than a temporary or
expedient alliance. This goes farther toward a claim for
abolitionism as a true biracial community than historians usually
go. Harrold does see limits to this biracialism, but he is adamant
about studying the subversives "as an example of how progressive
interracial cooperation ... could exist for an extended period in a
slaveholding region of nineteenth-century America" (p. 255).
Harrold is careful to place limits on his claim. Interracialism, he
notes, fell on hard times with the arrival of Free Soilism, and it
deteriorated steadily over the 1850s and especially during the Civil
War years (pp. 169, 225-251). In addition, white abolitionists
often worked only with the city's black "middle class," with whom
they shared values and Christianity. Black Washingtonians such as
the Edmondsons--part white and very refined--were most frequently
the recipients of white attention. But there were affinities,
Harrold writes, beyond those of class and culture. According to
Harrold, antislavery whites on the border experienced external
pressures that helped to forge interracial bonds. White
abolitionists witnessed slavery's brutality firsthand, and the joint
risks, triumphs, and social exclusions they shared with black
abolitionists created emotional bonds between the two groups (pp.
45, 60). The presence of stronger interracial communities than
abolitionist historians usually find, in other words, is yet another
way that studying those who attacked slavery from within the
institution itself changes our understanding of the movement as a
whole.
Harrold's study further strengthens its argument for a biracial
community by uncovering a great deal of evidence about the city's
black abolitionists. By creating a rich portrait of Washington's
black leadership and by emphasizing their active role in recruiting
white abolitionists stationed in their city to their practical
antislavery measures, Harrold makes the claim for an interracial
community that is essentially initiated by blacks. They provide the
physical and emotional context for the city's abolitionist movement,
and one senses that whites such as Torrey and Chaplin were brought
into a pre-existing black community as essential but minority
elements of the movement. Perhaps the clear superiority of black
organization in the city compelled white abolitionists to recognize
the black community as both an integral part of abolition and as a
necessary source of emotional and social resources. It is Harrold's
study of black abolitionists that makes his claim to have unearthed
a truly biracial community a plausible interpretation for the 1840s
and to a lesser degree the 1850s.
Like Harrold's other works focusing on the abolitionist campaign
along the Mason-Dixon line, this book will challenge and sometimes
enthrall its readers. It should also substantially redirect
abolition studies in a number of ways.
Copyright (c) 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
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