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Four lives, one point
John Stauffer’s boxed Abolitionists
BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG

The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race
By John Stauffer. Harvard University Press, 367 pages, $29.95.


In telling the story of one segment of the Abolitionist movement, that of the radicals who were willing to use violence to end slavery, John Stauffer is unable to depict the simple humanity of it. If there’s any story in American history that tells itself, it’s the Abolitionist one. But no: Stauffer’s four protagonists are not fighting for a cause, they’re seeking " visions of a pluralist society. " Radical abolition was not cause enough for them; they are said to be feminists, and in one case insensitive to American Indians, and judged by Stauffer as such. Before the Civil War, all four are dedicated to the violent overthrow of slavery; after it, two of them " backslide, " one doesn’t, and the fourth — John Brown — is dead.

Stauffer is constantly putting his protagonists in cultural boxes, from the " Byronism " of Gerritt Smith to the bourgeois-ism of Frederick Douglass — who, we’re told, decided that " to confront white bourgeois culture he had to be bourgeois himself " ! These boxes are, of course, artifacts of the late 20th century. And from one Abolitionist turning point to another — for example, the split between the non-violent, mostly white Garrisonians and the racially integrated radicals who, after the early 1850s, more and more took over the movement — Stauffer focuses not on the drama of the divisions, or on the political events that aggravated them, but on who " had a black heart " and who was " thinking like a black man " rather than like " a white man. " In his view, those who sought freedom for black Americans by radical means " had remade themselves as black men " ; those who sought such freedom less passionately (or did not seek it at all) were " part of the white mainstream. "

It’s a simplistic and mechanical standard, with no room for the poignant sloppiness of actual human existence. Hardly any of the heroes of the 1850s and 1860s counted in the 1870s and 1880s: yet instead of pointing out that Douglass and Smith were just two of the many Civil War–era notables who experienced a slackening of heart, Stauffer insists on isolating them from the larger world. He talks of Smith’s " backsliding " from a " pluralist " America and Douglass’s " moderation, " as if he had been personally betrayed by their change of heart. One can almost hear him applauding the continuing radicalism of James McCune Smith (his fourth subject), the New York City doctor and intellectual who helped bankroll John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.

John Brown, of course, was dead by then; there would be, could be, no " backsliding " or " moderation " for him. But his life is the one part of this book that’s consistently engaging. Stauffer supports Brown’s millenarian vision of a racially equal and integrated society; he also supports Brown’s willingness to use violent means. Yet his partisanship allows Brown the freedom it denies to Douglass and the two Smiths. Partly that’s because Brown has been placed by most Americans, for all these decades, in the kind of box that Stauffer puts his other three heroes in. Brown has been the crazy one, the man whose killing sprees in Kansas and at Harper’s Ferry made the Civil War unavoidable. Stauffer allows Brown to be fully, freely himself: to fail at business, to taste the guilt of being white in a slave America; to recruit his racially mixed following; to work terror in Kansas; to found the integrated community of North Elba, New York, and to gather an integrated army (17 white men, five black) for his raid on Harper’s Ferry; to get himself hanged as a result and to die knowing that, in his words (and with his punctuation), only blood will wash away " the guilt; of a guilty land. "

Yet Stauffer cheapens even this portrait by insisting that Brown had succeeded in " thinking as a black man " and " giving himself a black heart. " Is it too much to assert that Brown, in passionately, violently seeking an end to the terrible stain of slavery, was simply a man committed to a purpose? In following the fervently Biblical Brown from a life of failure to one of guilt followed by violent expurgation, I was prompted to think of Mohammed Atta, who also committed himself to God-driven sacrificial violence against a sinful enemy. He too unleashed a horror of war — yet I doubt that Stauffer would say that Atta had given himself a black heart. Why say anything when the life of such a man as John Brown speaks for itself?

Issue Date: October 31 - November 7, 2002
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