| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Stauffer. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2002. Pp. 367. $29.95.
This collective biography of four American abolitionists—John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, and James McCune Smith—tells the story of those "interracial bonds of friendship and alliance" that brought them "together to seek equality for all people." These men shared the conviction that "whites had to understand what it was like to be black" and to "renounce their belief in skin color as a marker of aptitude and social status." According to John Stauffer, those who experienced this radical transformation acquired "black hearts" (p. 1).	1
Of the four, Gerrit Smith receives most of Stauffer's attention. Long recognized as an important antislavery and reform figure, Smith's poor handwriting has rendered his extensive correspondence inaccessible and his life understudied. Stauffer's sympathetic treatment contrasts with Ralph Volney Harlow's critical and more detailed Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939). The son of a New York slaveholder and heir to a considerable fortune, Smith would seem an unlikely candidate for activism. Yet Smith's tyrannical father worked his sons alongside his slaves, causing Gerrit to feel "sorry for both himself and his 'poor' and 'friendless' co-workers" (p. 75). In 1826, after several personal crises, his second wife, Ann Carroll Fitzhugh, converted him to evangelical Protestantism. Smith immediately embraced reformist causes and his generosity quickly secured the attention of reform leaders. Originally a colonizationist who favored slavery's gradual demise, Smith espoused immediate abolition by the mid-1830s and, during the 1840s, the Liberty Party.	. . .

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