| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform. Ed. by Steven Mintz and John Stauffer. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. xiv, 405 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-1-55849-569-2. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-55849-570-8.)

The premise of this essay collection is that the institution of slavery as practiced in the American South was a historical evil that has never been fully confronted or atoned for. While a major strand of recent scholarship has focused on slavery's moral and philosophical implications as well as its physical, emotional, and psychological cruelties, coeditor Steven Mintz suggests that a true moral history of slavery must wrestle with bigger questions that allow for more profound meanings—such as "why, if slavery's evil is self-evident to us, this wasn't apparent to our forebears?"; and "what are the circumstances and ideologies that make horrendous forms of evil possible?" (p. 7). Those are the core issues explored in the twenty-two all-too-brief essays that make up this volume, along with several corollaries, such as "why ... a small group of people," antebellum abolitionists, were "able to perceive a moral evil that others had remained blind to for hundreds of years" (p. 128); how those reformers envisioned, often in millennial terms, slavery's destruction and a resulting postemancipation "nation free from sin and people living in perfect freedom" (p. 221); and finally how that idealism and optimism so quickly dissolved, as racial bigotry and oppression and social and economic inequities driven by race continued to taint American ideas of freedom and opportunity from Reconstruction through much of the twentieth century, in the United States and abroad.

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