Book Review

Antislavery Violence consists of an introduction and ten essays, including one by each editor, that stake a clear, semi-revisionist claim. Following Herbert Aptheker (to whom the volume is dedicated), Merton L. Dillon, and Stanley Harrold, the editors assert that "Many of the authors contributing to this collection also perceive a longer and more forthright history of abolitionist support for violent means than earlier historians believed." Rejecting the notion that abolitionists and slave rebels are comparable to contemporary terrorists, the editors state that the collection "seeks neither to condemn nor to glorify acts of political violence against slavery." A key assumption here is that the violence treated in this book is "political," a concept that is not explored within the collection and seems strained at times, as in the admission that "The consciously political goals of Nat Turner . . . are more difficult to ascertain than those of Gabriel and Vesey." By locating violence against slavery as "political," however, the editors answer scholars tempted to dismiss extreme abolitionists as "emotionally unstable."

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