| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Susan M. Ryan. The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 235. $42.50.

Susan M. Ryan is a literary scholar, not a historian. Nevertheless, the topics that she addresses in this book—benevolence, race, nation, and citizenship—are common parlance among historians, as are discussions about how nineteenth-century Americans understood each in relation to the other. Using the tools of her craft, Ryan analyzes written representations of benevolence, seeking to explicate "the relationships among benevolent discourse, racial ideologies, and national identities" (p. 14). In addition, because she believes modern readers find it hard to credit the good intentions of nineteenth-century charitable workers, she hopes to press them to "move beyond the question of whether benevolence was progressive or retrogressive" (p. 5). Her approach involves parsing how selected authors "used, shaped, and lived within" what she terms "competing rhetorics of benevolence" (p. 1) or "the discourse of benevolence" (p. 148). Those authors range from charitable society organizers to novelists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville to political writers such as Frederick Douglass. With such a diverse cast of characters, Ryan finds little common ground on the meanings of benevolence. Instead, her chapters "tell multiple—at times even contradictory—stories about Americans and their good intentions" (p. 22).

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