| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Democratic Discourses: The Radical Abolition Movement and Antebellum American Literature. By Michael Bennett. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. xii, 223 pp. Cloth, $62.00, ISBN 0-8135-3572-7. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8135-3573-5.)
In this slim volume, Michael Bennett, an English professor trained in African American studies, analyzes the democratic discourses produced by eight antebellum writers. Focusing on "substantive" democracy, which he defines as a society in which all people have an equal say in the culture, he contends that antebellum radical abolitionists, more than any of their contemporaries, shaped a counterpublic sphere within which they created a vocabulary for radical change.	1
Bennett concentrates on four forms of democracy: bodily, gender, economic, and aesthetic. Within each of those forms he couples selected writings of a black radical abolitionist with those of a white writer who was neither radical nor an abolitionist: Frances Ellen Watkins and Walt Whitman on bodily democracy, which brought blacks and whites and men and women together in both public and private spaces; Sojourner Truth and Margaret Fuller on gender democracy, which espoused freedom for women to be let alone and to enjoy gender equality; Frederick Douglass and Henry David Thoreau on economic democracy, which condemned both wage and chattel slavery; and Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Beecher Stowe on aesthetic democracy, which promoted sympathetic representations of, and freedom for, the slave.	. . .

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