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The Black
Hearts of Men
Radical Abolitionists and The
Transformation of Race
By John Stauffer
Review
By Emma Jones Lapsansky
Almost four decades ago, when I was about to
enter an interracial marriage, a German comrade in the civil
rights movement encouraged me. "Unless some people live as
if the future is already here," she prophesied, "the
future we need will never come." John Stauffer's new
volume The
Black Hearts of Men introduces us to four
nineteenth-century civil rights activists who attempted to live
as if the future they needed had already come. And hence
Stauffer's study reminds us that the future of cross-racial and
cross-cultural alliances may depend upon remembering that such
alliances have had an honorable past, one that allowed
individuals to transcend such political constructs as race,
gender, class, age, or the other boundaries created by
societies.
Stauffer's study, an intertwined biography of
four men--two white, two black--recounts, in its basic story
line, the events and experiences that led them to found a
political party based upon their Christian beliefs concerning
the necessity of bringing about a new future for American
slavery, race relations, and democracy. Convening a small
conference in Syracuse, New York, in the summer of 1855, Gerrit
Smith, James McCune Smith, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown
founded the Radical Abolition Party, which lasted five years,
and polled a few thousand votes in its various political
campaigns between 1855 and 1860. (Among its several
campaigns, the party ran Gerrit Smith for president, and
Frederick Douglass for secretary of the state of New York,
making Douglass the first black man to be placed on an American
ballot.)
Distinguishing themselves from the
left-leaning Free Soil Party, that opposed the extension of
slavery, and from the even farther left-wing Garrisonians who
sought to use "moral suasion" to convince all
Americans that slavery was a sin and should be immediately
eradicated everywhere, the Radical Abolitionists insisted that
removing slavery from every inch of American soil was a
God-driven mission, and that it must be pursued by whatever
means necessary—even violence and murder. Unlike the Garrisonians, who held that morality and spirituality should be
aloof from politics, the Radical Abolitionists argued that
politics should be the foundation and the outlet for true
spirituality, and that the Constitution should be seen as a
sacred text on a par with the Bible.
Stauffer argues, however, that the most
important contribution of the Radical Abolition Party is not in
its politics, but in its leadership, a leadership comprised of
four men who broke through the mistrust inherent in a racist
system to become friends as well as abolitionist colleagues.
Using these men whose cross-racial friendship previewed the
future, Stauffer suggests that the empathy, admiration, and
trust that cemented their friendship is the key to a democratic
future for America, even while he notes the tragedy of that
relationship.
The tragedy, Stauffer tells us, is that the
friendship between these men was built upon a mutual commitment
to violence—God-inspired violence, but violence nonetheless.
It is here that Stauffer moves from neutral historian to biased
commentator, for he frequently reminds his readers of his own
conviction that nothing enduringly positive can come from
violence. (I agree with this conviction, but Stauffer's
repetition of it is sometimes annoyingly didactic.) He
focuses heavily on Gerrit Smith's "guilt about his sanction
of violence" (p. 267), and leaves no room for the
possibility that it was John Brown's commitment to violence that
paved the way for the positive change wrought by the Civil War.
Black Hearts won the Avery O. Craven
prize, awarded by the Organization of American Historians for
"the most original book on the coming of the Civil
War—with the exception of works of purely military
history." The work certainly fits that guideline, for
it explores an aspect of American history aptly named by
Reconstruction historian C. Vann Woodward as a "forgotten
alternative," namely, that antebellum American history
contains several examples of cross-racial alliances and
cooperation, which, for many reasons, the
late-nineteenth-century era of Jim Crow has erased from our
collective memory.
Stauffer tells us that Gerrit Smith's
correspondence with Douglass and McCune Smith "represents
the largest biracial correspondence in antebellum America"
(p. 3), and, therefore, it offers a window onto a crucial aspect
of nineteenth-century race history. I have recently come
upon a similarly rich cache of correspondence between
Philadelphia white Quaker Benjamin Coates and more than a dozen
African Americans, including Frederick Douglass, Mary Ann Shadd
Cary, and Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the Virginian who relocated to
Liberia and eventually became its president.[1] Like Gerrit
Smith, Coates was generous in his economic support
of black causes (although nowhere near the magnitude of Smith) and
tireless in his correspondence with them. But Coates
differed from Gerrrit Smith in that, although he sometimes
entertained Roberts in his home, and often addressed his black
correspondents in intimate terms, he did not embrace them as
equals, seldom incorporated their ideas into his own thinking,
and never developed an intimate interracial community.
So in exploring the friendship between the
two Smiths, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown, Stauffer has,
indeed, created an "original" work, introducing the
importance of friendship, mutuality, and what he calls
"diverse aspects of identity and personal behavior"
(p. 4) into our understanding of nineteenth-century politics.
Stauffer spends considerable time on the important diverse
aspects of religious identity in nineteenth-century America, and by and large
the book is the stronger for it. Like many scholars,
however, he falls into the trap of describing "the
Quakers" without distinguishing the continuum of Quaker
radicalism over race that extends from Lucretia Mott, who
included black people in her social circle, to colonizationists
like Coates, who felt that African Americans would be better off
in Africa, to those who insisted that all society would be
better off if African Americans were to return to Africa.
In these ways, Stauffer's work invites a
deeper search for correspondence between nineteenth-century
black Americans and their white benefactors.
Stauffer's work has a tantalizingly
contemporary tone, without falling into the sin of
"presentism." In seeking to make himself
a "colored man" (p. 15), Gerrit Smith,
Stauffer tells us, embraced the modern notion expressed
by James Baldwin, whom Stauffer quotes, that "the
only way [white Americans] can be released from the
Negro's tyrannical power over him is to consent, in
effect, to become black himself" (p. 1).
Using more than a dozen illustrations, quotes from
nineteenth-century thinkers as well as late
twentieth-century writers, and his own lyrical prose,
Stauffer takes us into the lives, minds, and
"hearts" of his four heroes, arguing that they
were right: unless white and black Americans allow
their hearts to embrace the world of each other,
salvation is unlikely for either. Readers will be
grateful to Stauffer for showing us four
nineteenth-century leaders who lived as if the future of
cross-racial comradeship were already here.
Note
[1]. These materials are soon to be published by Penn State
University Press.
John Stauffer. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical
Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 2002. 367 pp. Half-tones, bibliographic notes,
index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-00645. Reviewed by Emma Jones
Lapsansky / elapsans@haverford.edu / Department of
History, Haverford College. Copyright (c) 2003 by H-Net, all rights
reserved. |
