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• W1570441360 abstract "Reviewed by: The Abolitionist Imagination by Andrew Delbanco Richard Newman (bio) The Abolitionist Imagination. By Andrew Delbanco. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 205. Cloth, $24.95.) Andrew Delbanco, the Mendelson Family Chair of American Studies at Columbia University and a contributor to the New York Review of Books, is a humanities hero whose work in the nineteenth-century literary and cultural landscape has admirers in both academic and public realms. Unfortunately, Delbanco’s brief on the abolitionist imagination offers a dated look at the men and women who struggled against slavery in the 1800s. The Abolitionist Imagination is actually several books in one. At the center, Delbanco offers a framing essay on abolitionism as not only a historical movement but a powerful example of that “recurrent American phenomenon”: zealous reformers whose radical protest shatters mainstream norms and institutions (3). Originally presented as part of the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures on American Politics at Harvard University, Delbanco’s view of abolitionism pivots on a basic question. What happens, he wonders, when “a determined minority sets out, in the face of long odds, to rid the world of what it regards as a patent and entrenched evil” (3)? In the nineteenth century, according to Delbanco, reformers’ noble antislavery ends became fatally compromised by their radical means. Eschewing moderation, abolitionists pushed too hard. The result, even if abolitionists [End Page 407] were only indirectly responsible, was a deadly civil war. Indeed, as he puts it, “Abolitionism still compels us to ask what is, alas, a perennial question: How much blood for how much good?” (54). To be sure, Delbanco indicates that emancipation was worth almost any national sacrifice. Yet he registers lingering doubts. Veering off into contemporary debates over righteous violence endorsed by contemporary pro-life advocates, he intimates that abolitionism remains in many ways a negative symbol of radical reform. It may seem like a slippery slope, but Delbanco is not afraid to ride it. In addition to Delbanco’s essay on the abolitionist movement as a capacious reform vehicle in American history and memory, the book includes four commentaries by distinguished scholars and writers, as well as a final reply by Delbanco. The contributing essayists lurk behind Delbanco, offering a series of pointed challenges on issues ranging from evolving abolitionist tactics and strategies (which Delbanco ignores) to the critical importance of black abolitionists in nineteenth-century America (which he skims over too quickly). More than Delbanco, the contributing essayists provide fresh, lively, and cutting-edge perspectives. As John Stauffer and Manisha Sinha show, for instance, Delbanco ignores the essential fact that abolitionists tested a range of strategies during the early republic. As Stauffer notes, early abolitionists who favored moderate political and legal activism—precisely the type of careful reformers Delbanco longs for—failed to curb slavery’s massive expansion after 1800. That helps explain why new generations of black and white abolitionists embraced more radical measures. Moreover, as Sinha adds, abolitionists did not instigate the Civil War; a slaveholders counterrevolution, aimed at ever-more-robust protections of bondage, was more directly tied to sectional uprising. As for critiques of abolitionists, novelist and cultural critic Darryl Pinckney points out that many white reformers exhibited a none-too-subtle racism and paternalism. Yet, he makes clear, this should not detract from abolitionism’s broader intent: slaying the most economically lucrative and culturally powerful institution of human control in the Western world. One could raise other objections. On the subject of compensated emancipation as an alternative to war, to which Delbanco passingly refers, generations of American reformers floated this idea before slaveholders, who routinely rejected it. In The Confederate States of America (2005), Roger Ransom offers a counterfactual argument that compensated abolition in the South would have been costly but feasible. But American masters would not accept a world without bondage. Little wonder that many Unionists asserted that slaveholding had become a pathology by the 1860s. What [End Page 408] about the human costs of the Civil War? On this score, we might turn the question around. What about the costs of American nation-building? Was American growth, as abolitionists asked, worth the price of black blood? As Joshua Rothman has recently shown..." @default.
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• W1570441360 title "The Abolitionist Imagination by Andrew Delbanco" @default.
• W1570441360 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2013.0059" @default.
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