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Reviews of Books
to control black labor, stern Old Testament Protestantism, patriarchal attitudes toward women and children, and concern over honor and reputation, for
instance-are virtual constants in the period Marshall
covers. But constants cannot explain change. Hence,
some readers may feel that Marshall has not adequately addressed variation in diverse forms of violence, in terms of both rates and participants. Nonetheless, because of its rich description, this volume is a
welcome addition to the growing number of local and
regional studies that explore the dimensions of violence both in and beyond the cotton South.
ROBERTA SENECHAL DE LA ROCHE
Washington and Lee University
CLARE TAYLOR. Women of the Anti-Slavery Movement:
The Weston Sisters. (Studies in Gender History.) New
York: St. Martin's. 1995. Pp. xvi, 158. $59.95.
This short book is a welcome addition to the growing
body of literature on female abolitionists. Clare Taylor
is a British scholar who writes from an Anglo-American perspective. Appropriately enough, Maria Weston
Chapman and her five spinster sisters, who hailed from
Weymouth, Massachusetts and worked mainly in Boston, also had transatlantic connections. The study is
based chiefly on the Weston Papers and other antislavery collections in the Boston Public Library.
After a brief introduction placing the sisters in the
context of Garrisonian abolitionism, Taylor describes
the Weston family background and comments briefly
on each of them: Maria (born 1806), Caroline (1808),
Anne (1812), Deborah (1814), Lucia (1822), and
Emma (1825). The older ones took major roles in the
Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, holding meetings, circulating petitions, organizing fairs, issuing
publications, conducting correspondence, and attending conventions. Maria Weston Chapman dominates
the book. However, Taylor does not give her credit for
the famous declaration attributed to her as she faced a
Boston mob in 1835: "If this be the last bulwark of
freedom, we may as well die here as elsewhere." She
faced another mob in Philadelphia in 1838, where
Pennsylvania Hall (not Independence Hall as Taylor
calls it) was burned to the ground. Chapman apparently suffered a nervous breakdown as a result. These
episodes deserve fuller treatment than they receive
here.
Taylor pays particular attention to the annual reports of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society,
written by Chapman and published under the title
Right and Wrong in Boston. In the most disappointing
section of her book, Taylor deals with the disruption of
the Society in 1840, emphasizing the religious affiliations of its different factions. (The Weston sisters were
Unitarians.) She says relatively little on the women's
rights issue.
The latter part of the book deals mainly with the
British and continental ties of the Weston sisters.
Harriet Martineau met Maria in Boston in 1835, and
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
they became lifelong friends. Other important English
contacts were Elizabeth Pease and Mary Estlin. In
1848, after the death of her husband, Henry Grafton
Chapman, Maria took her family and several friends to
Paris, where her children went to school and where she
established a base for European travel.
A chapter is devoted to the Liberty Bell, the antislavery annual edited by Chapman from 1839 to 1858. She
was successful in obtaining high-quality literary pieces;
Lydia Maria Child was a favorite contributor. This gift
book received its name from Philadelphia's Liberty
Bell. Throughout their careers, the Weston sisters
attempted to "proclaim liberty throughout all the land
unto all the inhabitants thereof."
The book is well organized and competently written.
It has extensive endnotes and an excellent bibliography.
IRA V. BROWN
Pennsylvania State University
ERLENE STETSON and LINDA DAVID. Glorying in Tribulation: The Lifework of Sojourner Troth. East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press. 1994. Pp. 242. $28.95.
Sojourner Truth is best known for her speech before
the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio,
which has come to be known as the "Ain't I A Woman"
speech. This biography reveals a Sojourner who was
much more than an advocate for women's rights. From
1850 on, Truth spent much of her life in public oratory,
working for the Garrisonian faction of the abolitionist
movement, speaking out on behalf of black women's
rights and political rights for women, critiquing the
economic restriction of blacks after the Civil War.
Erlene Stetson and Linda David have produced a
biography that not only portrays a fully three-dimensional life but also de constructs earlier biographical
depictions by those who wrote and edited versions of
Truth's autobiographical work, Narrative of the Life of
Sojourner Truth (1850). In this study, we learn much
about the many facets of one of history'S more fascinating personalities, as well as learning a good deal
about the way Truth's life story was mediated by the
white women who helped the non-literate Truth write
it.
Sojourner Truth was a well-known abolitionist. She
was also an evangelist, a mother and grandmother, a
suffragist, a spiritualist, a member of the infamous
Kingdom of Matthias, a communitarian, an associationist, a member of the Northampton Association, a
utopian seeker, a social reformer, and, perhaps, something of a performer. She did not know how to read or
write, yet she maintained a lively correspondence
through much of her life with the well-known and
well-born as well as the unknown. She "read" the
newspaper and the Bible daily by having them read to
her. She began life as a slave in New York state,
married twice, was sold half a dozen times, bore many
children and gained her freedom by walking away from
her owner when she decided it was time. (She subse-
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United States
quently had her freedom "purchased" by some sympathetic whites.) She would have earned a place in
history for her Akron speech alone, but she was much
more fascinating than that. Stetson and David approach the life and work of Sojourner Truth not in
standard biographical form but by first offering an
analysis and deconstruction of her autobiography-the
life given forth in Truth's narrative as a "told text" and
thus mediated by the white women who wrote it down
for her and often editorialized or interpolated their
own agendas.
This book begins laboriously for someone who anticipates a traditional biography and a good narrative.
The labor builds an intriguing, multi-layered look at a
single life, however, that reconstructs nineteenth-century religious and social experiments and a milieu of
reformers, dreamers, and zealots. One life is not an
isolated story line but interacts with a much larger set
of stories. This book is worth reading for the single
story, but it is far more valuable in portraying the
larger world around the person of Sojourner Truth.
JANICE BRANDON-FALCONE
Northwest Missouri State University
STANLEY HARROLD. The Abolitionists and the South,
1831-1861. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
1995. Pp. x, 245. $29.95.
The title of this book is somewhat misleading. As
Stanley Harrold himself admits in his introduction, his
main concern is with "efforts within the South to
destroy slavery" (p. 1). Nor do the eight chapters of his
book add up to a complete history of the antislavery
movement in the South but only a commentary on
certain aspects of the subject.
The first chapter deals with southern abolitionism
before 1831. Harrold's main focus is historiographical.
He surveys what numerous historians have said on the
subject and concludes that early nineteenth-century
southern abolitionists did not foreshadow northern
immediatism and were not a significant threat to
slavery.
In the second chapter, Harrold considers several
prominent southern abolitionists such as James G.
Birney, Cassius M. Clay, and John G. Fee and concludes that northern hopes for them as heralds of
general emancipation were unjustified. This is followed by a study of black abolitionists, especially those
involved in slave revolts. A sequel to their activity was
the work of "slave rescuers" who made forays into the
South to lead slaves to freedom. Harriet Tubman is the
most famous of these abolitionists. Among white rescuers of slaves, Harrold emphasizes Charles T. Torrey,
but several others are discussed. Abolitionists believed
that these people, whom Harrold calls "John Brown's
forerunners" (p. 64), could help undermine slavery.
They certainly promoted sectional conflict.
Northern missionary work directed at southern
slaves provides the theme of yet another chapter. The
American Missionary Association, founded in 1846,
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was the leading organization of this type. Oberlin
College supplied a number of antislavery missionaries.
Amos Dresser was attacked by a proslavery mob for
distributing antislavery tracts in Nashville. Harrold
also takes up the formation of antislavery colonies in
the upper South. Frances Wright had established a
community for freedmen at Nashoba, Tennessee, in
the 1820s, but this particular colony is not discussed
here. Harrold pays particular attention to the colony at
Ceredo, Virginia, founded by John C. Underwood and
Eli Thayer in the 1850s. The most successful of the
southern antislavery colonies led to the founding of
Berea College in Kentucky.
Chapter 7, "The Intersectional Politics of Southern
Abolitionism," covers the work of southern political
abolitionists, most notably Cassius M. Clay and Gamaliel Bailey. It also deals with the relationship between
these figures and northern abolitionists. The last chapter focuses on the relationship between southern antislavery activity and the events leading to the Civil War;
it also covers the participation of southern abolitionists
in Reconstruction.
The book demonstrates that there was a real and
significant abolitionist presence in the upper South
before the Civil War. It appears to be factually accurate and sound in interpretation. It is well organized
and competently written. It is extensively documented
and has a thorough bibliography. It is well printed
except for a few typographical errors. It has a good
index. Finally, it has a fine portfolio of illustrations,
including good portraits of a number of the abolitionists who figure in the book.
IRA V. BROWN
Pennsylvania State University,
University Park
MARTIN KLAMMER. Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1995. Pp. 176. $32.50.
Martin Klammer's study of Walt Whitman, slavery,
and race-based politics is the first book-length study
to place Whitman's life and career in the context of
antebellum racial relations. The richness ofthe book's
topic is suggested by its dust jacket, which presents
side-by-side frontal daguerreotypes of Whitman in or
around 1854 and of a slave photographed on a South
Carolina plantation in 1850. What, one wonders, does
Whitman have to do with "Jack," and on what basis is
it possible to speak of their connection? The answer,
for Klammer, is that the poet and poetry of the seminal
1855 Leaves of Grass (but not of any of the subsequent
editions) were engendered in large part by Whitman's
immersion in the racially charged politics of the early
1850s. That thesis is unquestionably provocative, but it
is hard to prove in the best circumstances and impossible in the absence of a sophisticated theoretical
and/or practical grasp of the connections between
culture and society.
Klammer begins by tracing Whitman's evolution
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