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H-SHEAR FORUM ON DANIEL WALKER HOWE'S _WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT_ Scroll to the bottom for a complete list of previous installments. ****** NEXT MONDAY: Daniel Walker Howe Replies ****** TODAY: Bertram Wyatt-Brown on Religion and Reform Daniel Walker Howe's monumental work covers a wide range of topics, but among the most significant is his brilliant exposition of the dynamic rise of religious faith, the establishment of humanitarian reform through the expansion of civic institutions, and the development of abolitionism. The latter reform was an attempt to resolve the nation's intractable dispute over human bondage. Howe treats these phenomena with skill, energy, and telling detail. Yet he also demonstrates how his larger theme of a revolution in communications and technological advance quickened both the possibilities and the urgency of the nation's political, social, and cultural transformation. The technique for painting so broad a canvas is to employ the concept of "braided narrative," a construction associated with the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz. As a result, one detailed and well- conceived theme merges or interacts with others in each chapter. Despite the complexity of Howe's construction, the texture of the whole retains an essential structure and coherence. In treating the subject of religion, reform, and abolitionism, this reviewer retains something of the same approach but treats Howe's otherwise integrated story of organizations and personalities separately. We begin with the general nature of American reforms and how they took on civic importance. The more important of these reforms were abolitionism, temperance, religious renewal, and the establishing of many innovative charitable and governmental institutions. These included the penitentiary to replace the stocks and branding iron, and the deaf and dumb and insane institutions to abolish the cruel incarceration of the helpless with diehard criminals in unheated cells. In Howe's opinion these reforms emanated from the Whiggish impulse rather than from any upsurge of democracy under President Jackson. As other parts of _What Hath God Wrought_ make clear, Whig partisanship and the appeal of Protestant moral and humanitarian values, both in and outside the political sphere, maintained a steady alliance. That union lasted all the way into the Northern Whigs' Republican reincarnation in the 1850s. Personalities of historical figures are so skillfully drawn in Howe's narrative that they come alive in telling detail and useful anecdote. They make the more abstract concerns of organizational growth and ideological variations more understandable. Incremental in the development of civil and benevolent institutions was the work, for instance, of the redoubtable evangelist Charles Grandison Finney. Howe offers no less than six pages (pp. 170-76) to this charismatic leader of the Second Great Awakening. About the same number of words is given to the turbulent and dramatic rise of the Mormon sect. Finney served as the inspiration for many devout reformers after he had abandoned a law career and begun his revival ministry. The New York revivalist might be said to be the architect of revival strategy, with his "anxious benches" for penitent sinners, fiery sermons, Arminian doctrine of sanctification in the present life, and his anti- hierarchical sanctions against church pew purchasers. The Gospel, church reformers insisted, was meant to reach the poor as well as the rich. Finney's religion, as Howe correctly notes, centered on his own humanity more than on God's divinity as the source of inspiration, although the two elements were supposed to work hand in hand. Moreover he, as well as others in the evangelistic outreach, permitted women a greater share in the missionary causes and other church-related work than the long established denominations provided. Finney linked antislavery reform with his interpretation of the Gospels, and his followers were to include many of the great abolitionist leaders. The most serious challenge to American unity was, of course, the abolitionist cause and the backlash that effort aroused in the honor-haunted slave states. Being himself a New Englander, Howe is most impressive in his handling of antislavery developments, ones that cannot be found in so rich a context in any other popular and narrative history of the nineteenth century. Howe does not follow the usual historical line that stresses the weight of secular factors, particularly the Declaration of Independence. While the abolitionists were to exploit Jefferson's revolutionary document, their chief impetus grew from religious convictions. Taking this approach, Howe justifiably links the evolution of the cause to the stimulant of evangelical and Quaker faith. In dealing with the abolitionist cause, Howe traces its origins to the preliminary, if flawed approach of the colonizationists in the early nineteenth-century decades. Here again, the story centers not on organizational development but rather on personalities. Paul Cuffe, a Quaker shipowner of mixed blood, Charles Fenton Mercer, an earnest slaveholding Virginian, and the Rev. Robert Finley of Princeton were the principal initiators. Devout New Englanders and Southern slaveowners, who feared slave uprisings, joined hands in the ultimately impractical and morally questionable endeavor. It is noteworthy, as Howe observes, that Cuffe sought the return of freedmen to Africa. The Philadelphia shipping entrepreneur Cuffe doubted the possibility of any change in white attitudes about blacks' competence or blacks' ambition to rise above their station. In Africa, Cuffe reasoned, they might prosper in freedom, a dream that later Martin R. Delany, and, most prominently, Marcus Garvey in the 1920s advocated. Finley, whose Scottish father had despised the institution of slavery, represented the more humane and religious wing of the divided movement. Offering a long overlooked factor, Howe sees Canada as a far more popular destination for fleeing slaves than the American Colonization Society's distant Liberia, founded in 1816. Thousands of former slaves settled in eastern Canada as a result of individual escape (later developed as the Underground Railroad) or British policy as war measures in the Revolution and the War of 1812. In this connection, the author includes the singular history of Abdul Rahahman Ibrahima, a son of Sori, the _alimami_ or theocratic ruler of the Fulbe, whose capital was Timbo in present-day Guinea. Ibrahima had been an officer with his father's troops years before. He is the only known American slave to have been returned to his native land after years of captivity. Called "Prince," Ibrahima was so used to command in his native country that he served as driver for his master Thomas Foster's 120 plantation slaves in Adams County, Mississippi. A physician, adventurer, and world traveler, Dr. Samuel Cox recognized a watermelon vendor on the Natchez Road despite the many years since he had known him in Timbo. Cox began a campaign to return the slave home. Eventually, Foster reluctantly agreed. The American Colonization Society arranged to bring the slave north. An extensive fund-raising effort in New York and Boston made it possible for Ibrahima and some of his family to set sail for Africa in 1829. The aged, dignified, black gentleman had cut an impressive figure. His cause aroused much popular interest in the free states. The campaign in behalf of Ibrahima was among the first national efforts to introduce the inhumanity of the slave trade to a long indifferent Northern public. The use of an individual character like the Mississippi slave to bring home the plight of the poor and downtrodden slave gained a much wider and more sympathetic audience than any polemic could ever achieve. Another illustration of personalized reform is Howe's treatment of the _Amistad_ case, which brings to life, as the case itself did, characters like the Mendian African Cinque, the evangelical abolitionist Lewis Tappan, the attorneys Theodore Sedgwick, and the former president John Quincy Adams. As these well-told personal narratives indicate, one of Howe's strengths is the balance he achieves in handling white and black elements in the antislavery cause. He is also cognizant of the role women played in the abolition societies and in such efforts as the evangelical revival campaigns, the temperance movement, and in Dorothea Dix's remarkable career as the tireless spokeswoman for the mentally troubled and handicapped. Howe's chief area of interest, though, is the interracial character of the antislavery movement. Frederick Douglass's life and achievements receive justifiable attention even though his prominence was really more evident in the 1850s and the Civil War years. Douglass is scarcely the only black advocate for freedom in these pages. David Walker's _Appeal to the Colored Citizens_ receives welcome analysis along with a poignant account of its author's life. Other African-American leaders such as the Rev. Richard Allen, a former Delaware slave, and his colleague Absalom Jones receive welcome notice. They established a strong sense of religious community for Philadelphia's African-American inhabitants. Sojourner Truth, the former slave from New York, spoke eloquently for emancipation. She did not have the Southern accent often attributed to her, but rather a touch of the New York Dutch accent, as Howe reveals. William Still, black leader of the Underground Railroad, and even Harriet Tubman, whose work with the fugitive slaves gained greater publicity in the 1850s both receive their rightful due. More could have been written about Samuel Cornish, the Revs. Henry Highland Garnet, Theodore S. Wright, and Peter Williams. All of them were influential African-American church and civic leaders in New York. Yet that might be asking too much for a book already over 900 pages. Far too long neglected in histories of the period, black abolitionists have lately seemed to scholars to stand at the forefront of abolitionist movement. However eloquent black preachers and fugitive slave writers were, the undertaking required white leadership in a very race-conscious society. One of Howe's many strengths is that he gives no less attention to the white reformers than he does to the black. William Lloyd Garrison, for instance, receives full notice as a New England journalistic firebrand, who championed the policy of immediate emancipation in America. Howe does a splendid job of demonstrating the Boston newspaperman Garrison's shrewd understanding of the power of public opinion when he began publishing _The Liberator_ in 1831. At the same time, in the handling of the organizational issue in abolition, Howe does err on an important point. He attributes the rapid growth of antislavery societies in the 1830s to the Boston reformer. Garrison was not an administrator of the first order. Left out of Howe's description is the indispensability of the evangelical clergy and laymen at the Manhattan headquarters of the American Anti- Slavery Society, founded in 1833. They developed the national society's network of chapters from Maine to Ohio, from Pennsylvania to the Northwest. The true leaders of this enterprise were not Bostonians but residents of New York and Ohio. They included the pious and efficient Tappan, the Rev. Joshua Leavitt, a young reform journalist, the brilliant young writer and mathematician Elizur Wright from Hudson, Ohio, and, above all, the charismatic preacher and writer, Theodore Dwight Weld. An example of how interlocked reform, religion, and abolitionism were in practice is the connection between the antislavery forces and the "Benevolent Empire." The term referred to the array of missionary and Christian organizations that had arisen after the War of 1812. Every spring the American Tract Society, the Bible Society, the Temperance Society, the Seaman's Friends Society, and other like-minded groups held their annual meetings during "May Week." The choice of date was well taken. Village merchants in the interior had to place their yearly orders with suppliers for the goods to sell during the rest of the year. They and their wives could enjoy the company of fellow churchmen, conduct their commercial deals, and tour the city sights. In describing the philanthropic events, Howe's narrative is lively and quite thorough, except that he misses a choice opportunity to explore the transatlantic character of reform altogether. The concept of "associationism," that is, the creation of assemblies to press for a single objective in the public, civic sphere, actually had English, not strictly American origins, as he implies. The adoption of the arrangement in the United States was a conscious imitation of the British system. In the late eighteenth century, Broad-Church Anglican and evangelical English laity and clergy founded societies to promote foreign missions, Sunday Schools, Bible and tractarian dispersions, and other benevolent novelties. Britannia ruled not only the waves but also transatlantic culture. In both nations, the middle class populated and drove these efforts. Yet, the nominal leadership of presidents, vice-presidents, and board of trustee members was accorded to the wealthiest and most prestigious members who could be induced to serve. They represented the "respectability" of the cause being promulgated. Lesser folk were expected to be impressed--and customarily were. In addition, the causes themselves were not, for the most part, American born. Howe cites some of the more curious undertakings--the Ladies' Association for the Benefit of Gentlewomen of Good Family, Reduced in Fortune Below the State of Comfort to Which They Have Been Accustomed, for instance. But the society was a British not American enterprise--unless perchance this worthy benefaction had crossed the ocean. Members of the Church of England founded it to assist low- salaried vicars' widows. Howe does not mention the British invention, the National Society for the Relief of the Ruptured Poor. Maybe it failed to reach these shores, to the continuing distress of American victims of the disability. On a more serious note, Howe does not investigate very thoroughly the inspiration American abolitionists took from British antislavery leaders. In line with this transatlantic inquiry, which Howe has overlooked, a few passages ought to have been accorded the late eighteenth-century "Clapham Sect." This earnest group of English Latitudinarians was among the very first organized groups to dedicate themselves to the eradication of the African slave trade. Its members included such notables as Wilberforce (mentioned once), James Stephens, Hannah More, Lord Teignmouth, Granville Sharp, and Henry Thornton, all of them influential in church and parliamentary circles. Zachary Macaulay, another Clapham sectarian, as it were, was the founder of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), progenitor of a similar and still thriving American society. The Rev. John Newton, author of "Amazing Grace," Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgewood, the pottery manufacturer, and the banking families of Gurneys, Frys, and Buxtons also influenced the American movement by their example of words written or charitable donations given for the antislavery cause among many others. In later years, the radical Parliamentary Whig Henry Lord Brougham, the Irish leader Daniel O'Connell, the Scottish reformer George Thompson, and the Quaker radical Joseph Sturge, British leader of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, all played a part in American reform and political efforts for black emancipation. With current interest in international connections and global concerns, Howe could have devoted some attention to this subject. After all, English opposition to slavery was of no small benefit to Abraham Lincoln and the Union when the Confederate government sought to gain recognition at White Hall during the Civil War. Another of these foreign innovations was not in the realm of ideas and techniques of reform but in a technological advance which Howe fails to discuss adequately--the steam press. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, German printer Friedrich Koenig put together a printing press that ran on coal-fired steam. It could produce 1100 pages an hour. A few years later in England he developed a much improved machine that printed material on both sides of a sheet at once. Leaders of the American Tract Society, founded in 1825 at New York, quickly realized that cheap and fast printings could be adopted for religious enlightenment. Their short, simple, moral stories, embellished with appropriate woodcuts, rolled off the Manhattan presses. Hundreds of missionary colporteurs (itinerant agents) distributed them throughout the towns and villages of the land. The tales of sudden conversions through the agency of a dying Christian's final words, narratives about the perils of drink, and similar homilies offered a simple means to reach the American public. The Society's tracts were shrewdly fashioned for appeal to first readers in a newly literate lower classes with aspirations for respectability and better incomes. Needless to say, the abolition, temperance, and other causes of the day quickly grasped the new means to reach a popular audience. To close on a positive note, Howe skillfully interrelates reform, religion, and American political culture. That is most evident in his treatment of the 1840 crisis in abolitionist history. From the start, the movement owed much to the fervor of the Second Great Awakening. The enthusiasm gradually dissipated and reformers went their separate ways, sometimes in pursuit of a utopian dream or an experiment in sexual freedoms--much to the horror and contempt of Southern conservatives. During the economic downturn after 1837, nerves were shattered, confidence lost, money gone. At the same time, abolition unity dissolved into three main factions. Frustrated by the timidity and dismissiveness of regular denominational leaders about the sins of slavery, the young Boston orator Wendell Phillips, the aristocratic Maria Weston Chapman and Edmund Quincy joined Garrison in a crusade for "secular humanism," as it might be called. Their agenda embraced non-resistance, radical feminism, and a fiery opposition to the American Constitutional and political system, one that tolerated, even promoted slavery. Meantime, the evangelical wing, once dominant, continued to plow the old ground. Its leaders, as Howe points out, formed such new agencies as the American Missionary Association which combined abolitionism with the conversion of the heathen at home and abroad. A third element in the antislavery splintering proved most effective. Upper New York state politicians Myron Holley and Henry Stanton, landowner Gerrit Smith of Peterboro, New York, former Kentucky slaveholder James G. Birney, Elizur Wright, and others formed the Liberty party as the surest way to overthrow a slavocracy. The May 1840 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City resulted in Garrison's cause for feminism and non-resistance winning full control. In defeat, the evangelicals marched out in dismay. Yet, each of these factions, as Howe notes, made their separate contributions to the antislavery cause. The Garrisonians set a standard of radicalism by which others could measure themselves. The evangelicals continued their pressure on the established Northern denominations and became the backbone of the Republican party in the 1850s. The political wing, thus strengthened by the eventual evangelical acceptance of partisanship, drew the cause into the center of political conflict. The result was a tragic but triumphant war which in 1865 at last resolved the issue of black freedom. Howe does not, however, dwell solely on the abolitionist part in the coming sectional crisis. Instead, he titles his last pages, "Finale: A Vision of the Future." In large measure it refers to the centrality of swift and unsettling change in human relationships, including the emergence of feminist and women's suffrage causes. The 1848 revolutions in Europe, he implies, had their counterpart in a far more peaceful and uplifting endeavor: the adoption of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "Declaration of Sentiments" at Seneca Falls, New York. Some of her colleagues in the woman's movement, including Hicksite Quaker Lucretia Mott, were horrified that Stanton should advocate suffrage for women. Such an innovation, most Americans, male and female, believed, would be a corrupting influence on the purity of womanhood. Moreover, complained the abolitionist critics, advocacy of the right for women to vote had already weakened the antislavery cause at the 1840 New York convention. Many argued that further agitation on that topic would be a perilous distraction from the country's chief moral question of slaveholding. Yet, Gerrit Smith, Stanton's cousin, and the Unitarian Rev. Samuel May both favored the new and radical cause. "Women's rights," Howe observes, "took its place as part of a nexus of causes that overlapped" with such reforms as "abolition, temperance, and opposition to Indian removal, capital punishment and the war with Mexico" (p. 842). In these final pages, Howe takes stock of what he has developed. "This book," he writes, "tells a story; it does not argue a thesis. For that reason it does not end with a summary of an argument" (p. 849). But in truth, he does have a sturdy interpretation. For the first time in our historiography he makes crucial the questions of reform, religion, and antislavery in the context of technological, commercial, and industrial change. Narrative predominates throughout. Yet what holds this work together is its intertwined themes of reform and reaction. None of them is more significant than the struggles and triumphs of faith and their expression in what we, as the heirs of a rich legacy, consider good works. No essay review, even one as lengthy as this, can, of course, do justice to the broad landscape that Howe hath wrought. Nonetheless, we can marvel at his scholarly accomplishment and appreciate the new, enlightening, and even entertaining work that Howe presents. He offers a masterful rendition of a formative but seldom understood period in American history. ***** Catch up on previous parts of Howe Forum: INTRODUCTION (Oct. 27) http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0810&week=d&msg=/eKgyeicCgpYSkmSDVdJng JAMES HUSTON ON ECONOMIC HISTORY (Oct. 27) http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0810&week=d&msg=xC7PayA4egD0XIRVNPkdcA MICHAEL A. MORRISON ON POLITICAL HISTORY (Nov. 3) http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0811&week=a&msg=7lyPqVnVCIx6iIXmEMx2ig DAVID M. HENKIN ON THE "COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION" (Nov. 10) http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0811&week=b&msg=1vGEslA6v7PF6F6yHB3tew MARY P. RYAN ON WOMEN AND GENDER (Nov. 17) http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0811&week=c&msg=z155z8gznJ6g8419lSHctQ JAMES TAYLOR CARSON ON NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY (Nov. 24) http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0811&week=d&msg=81nZO0AUlEbrxIZKszL0tg MANISHA SINHA ON SLAVERY AND RACE (Dec. 1) http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0812&week=a&msg=%2bC6B8U5grW4ZGl22ci3b6w
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