W. Caleb McDaniel. The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery

This important volume brims with insights that are often delivered with unusually good turns of phrase. W. Caleb McDaniel's ambitions include painting Garrisonians on a transatlantic canvas and stretching that canvas from the 1830s through the 1860s—both unusual moves within a distinguished and voluminous historiography. He is successful on both counts, and thereby sheds considerable light on both the abolitionist movement and William Lloyd Garrison himself. The transnational turn in American historiography has convinced most scholars that our subjects were more cosmopolitan than we once thought. But that internationalization of the field does not always engage the question: What difference did it make that they thought and acted internationally? McDaniel does answer this question, and persuasively. Given that “like a densely woven double-helix, Anglophilia and Anglophobia sat near the molecular center of American culture” (p. 62), the Garrisonians' cooperation with British abolitionists (and reformers such as Charles Dickens) only increased the fury of anti-abolitionist mob and state action in the mid-1830s. McDaniel's account repeatedly illustrates that this “reign of terror” proved to be a significant turning point in the abolitionist movement. Though abolitionists were typically divided on many questions about how to respond, they united in increasing their commitment to agitation, so that they contributed a ringing “defense of constant deliberation and free inquiry” (p. 11) to antebellum American political culture. This in turn divided other northerners' reaction to the Garrisonians; for some it increased their sympathy as it connected to issues of free speech, while to others both the Garrisonians' cosmopolitanism and their unapologetic agitation proved deeply offensive and threatening.

Art · HERO · Historiography · Literature · Political science · Politics · Reign · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies