The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP. by James M. McPherson
Review by: Clayborne Carson
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 91, No. 4 (Winter, 1976-1977), pp. 740-742
Published by: The Academy of Political Science
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| POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
740
implicationsof the disaster at the Garden.Was 1924 a sort of fiery trial through
which the divided Democraticparty had to pass? It could be argued that this was
the last Democraticconventionuntil the 196os (or 1976) where a distinct southernbased candidatewas a significantpresidentialcontender.Again it might be hypothesized that even in the wake of the depression,the 1924 debacle continued to haunt
the Democraticparty. The principal national figure who tried, unsuccessfully, to
inspire among Democratsa reassessmentof their role after the rout in November
was FranklinD. Roosevelt. Need one be remindedof the assiduousnesswith which
Jim Farley cautiously wooed and cultivated the contending factions in the party
during the months that preceded the 1932 convention or the caution President
Roosevelt exerciseduntil 1938 in gingerly treating the tenuous elements that made
up his party'scoalition?
JOHN L. SHOVER
Lateof Universityof Pennsylvania
The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP by James M.
McPherson. Princeton, N. J., Princeton University Press, 1975.-xiii, 438 pp.
$20.00.
James M. McPhersonhas written a new defense of the abolitionists which extends
the thesis offered in The Struggle for Equality:The Abolitionists and the Negro in
the Civil War and Reconstruction-namely, that the abolitionists did not abandon
the cause of black advancementafter the Civil War. The present work examines the
activities and attitudes of abolitionists and their offspring during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of increasingly intense white racism
and erosion of black civil rights. While conceding the existence of paternalismand
ethnocentrismas important strains in the thought and behavior of white liberals,
McPhersonargues that abolitionistsand their descendantsremainedactive in racial
reformefforts and assumedprogressivepositions on most racial issues. The followers of William Lloyd Garrisonare found to be most consistent in their support of
black civil rights after 1870; fourteen of the Garrisoniansare identified as among
those active in the early NAACP. Less consistent in their commitmentto black civil
rights were descendantsof political or evangelical abolitionists, but they too are
found to be active in racial reformactivities, such as the drive to establishmissionary schoolsfor southernfreedmen.
McPhersonhas carefully sifted through journalistic and manuscript sources to
constructa balanceddescriptionof the attitudes of individuals who confrontedthe
difficult racial issues of the period. He is less successful in his attempt to provide
statistical precision for his study by focusing on the attitudes of a sample of neoabolitionistsas expressedin public statementson a series of racial issues. His sample
of 284 persons is disproportionatelycomposed of political activists and writers
whose views could be readily ascertained,and thus it does not necessarily reflect
the views of all the abolitionists'descendants.More troubling are the smaller sub-
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BOOKREVIEWS | 741
samples used to determinethe attitudesof abolitionistson particularissues. For example, the fact that thirty-five abolitionists denied the existence of significant innate racial differences,while only nine expressed racist positions is perhaps less
importantthan the fact that the vast majority of this highly vocal sample did not
publicly expresstheir views on the issue. In addition,judgmentsregardingthe views
of the abolitionists would have been more valuable had they been explicitly contrasted with the attitudes of other Americans from similar educational,class, ethnic, religious, and regional backgrounds.Without such a comparison, it remains
unclear whether McPhersonis arguing for intergenerationalcontinuities in political values or simply for similaritiesin the social origins of succeedinggenerations
of racial reformers.McPhersonmight favor the former notion, but such an argument should be buttressedby descriptionsof patterns of parent-childrelationships
andof socializationwithin abolitionistfamilies.
Also worth noting is the polemicaltone of many of the book's passages. McPherson clearly sympathizeswith and seeks to defend the abolitionists from past and
contemporaryattacks. In his view, they not only perseveredin their concern for
blacks, but they were more often right than were critics of their own time and the
present. Thus he argues against "the viewpoint of the black power movement of
recent
If" that missionary education "perpetuatedthe blacks' colonial dependence oniwhfiteliberals"by stating that "without this colonialism there would have
been little black higher education. . . . And there would have been fewer educated
leaders of black power movements"(p. 295). He also disagreeswith recent historical works that affirm the viability of Afro-American cultural in'stitutions and
family life under slavery. Thus, the teachers in southern black schools, although
probably guilty of exaggerating"the 'Sambo' syndrome in the black personality"
and "the universally corrupting impact of slavery," "were not racists; they believed the Negro inherentlyequal to the Caucasionand saw their mission as one of
helping him to achieve this equality." McPhersonacknowledges their "first-hand
knowledge of the effects of slavery. Their conclusions, however biased by middleclass Victorianism, were probably sounder than historians' generalizationsbased
on inferentialanalysisof incompletequantitativedata"(p. 66).
A major theme in the study is the increasingdeterminationof black leaders during the post-Reconstructionperiod to challenge the control exercisedby white reformers over black schools established by predominantlywhite religious groups.
McPhersondoes not make clear the extent to which his sample of abolitionistswere
active in the developmentof southern black education, but he does demonstrate
that the abolitionist spirit survived, though transformed,in the work of white
missionary-teachers,who saw themselves as the uplifters of the black race. As the
white neoabolitionistsof the turn of the century were precursorsof contemporary
white liberals, so also were the assertive black leaders of that era the forerunners
of the black nationalistsand racial separatistsof recent decades.In addition to discussing the complexblend of egalitarianismand paternalismin the thought of white
proponents of black advancement,McPherson offers suggestions of the intricate
mixture of racial consciousness, individual ambition, and racial romanticismthat
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742
| POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
continue to fuel modern black separatism.Much remains to be said regarding the
ideological componentsof white liberal thought on racial issues and the relationship between such thought and the changing social structure of the period. And
certainly McPhersondoes not pretend to offer the last word regarding the roots
of modernblack nationalism.One hopes that The Abolitionist Legacywill stimulate
furtherresearchregardingtheseimportanttopics.
CLAYBORNE CARSON
StanfordUniversity
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia by
Edmund S. Morgan. New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1975.-X, 454 pp.
$11.95Over the past decade,the growing interest in the social history of the Anglo-American colonies during the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries has yielded excellent
monographs on the Caribbeancolonies by Richard Dunn and Richard Sheridan;
on New Englandby Kenneth Lockridgeand Philip Greven, among others; and on
Pennsylvaniaby James Lemon. But this superb volume is the first modern booklength study of the socioeconomic development of Virginia, England's first and,
in many respects, most important continental colony. Of fundamentalimportance
to the understandingof the origins of Americansociety, it both brings us closer to
a comprehensivereconstructionof the social history of British colonization and
serves as a solid base for the study of early American history. Three introductory
chaptersexplorethe impulsesbehind and the nature of English and native American
culture on the eve of the founding of Virginia, a final chapteroffers a cursory and
not entirely persuasive interpretationof the relationship of society to political
thought in eighteenth-centuryVirginia, and an appendixcontains a careful discussion of the demographyof seventeenth-centuryVirginia. But the core of the book is
a detailed and brilliant exposition of the emergence and articulation of Virginia
society duringthe seventeenthcentury.
What Morgan describes is a new society involved in a century-long search for
sustenance, stability, and definition. Readers of his previously published articles
will be familiar with his interpretationof the earlier phases of this process. The
initial Jamestownsettlement was a fiasco, he suggests, not only because of poor
planning, unsuitability of the immigrants, and other reasons traditionally emphasized, but also becausethe settlers, who brought no traditionof industrywith them
and associatedagriculturalwork with the Indians they quickly came to disdain in a
typical example of early modern xenophobia, refused to cultivate enough corn to
feed themselves. Once the possibility of quick riches through tobacco cultivation
drove the settlers to frenziedwork after i615 during the first Americanboom, food
shortages, a high death rate among its laborers, and the expropriationof its resources by its own officers brought the Virginia Company close to ruin before it
lost its charterin the mid-162os. During the boom many of the features that sub-
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