Reviews of Books

The Changing Face of Antislavery

The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860. By LEONARD L. RICHARDS. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000 . Pp. x, 228 . $ 39.95 cloth, $ 19.95 paper.)

Reviewed by David N. Gellman, DePauw University

Origins and transformations, the stock in trade of so many historians, are particularly attractive themes for students of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. Confining the story to the United States alone only partially simplifies the narrative of the struggle by abolitionists and others to curtail and ultimately to eliminate North American slavery. The origins of the public battle over slavery lie both in the ongoing and irrepressible resistance of the slaves themselves and in the multiple upheavals of the American revolutionary era. But the motivations, methods, and impact of early American antislavery movements are less well understood. How did American abolitionism develop from the small, elite initiatives of the early republic into the radical, crusading force of the antebellum era, rallying ordinary people across barriers of color, class, and gender? That process is conventionally told as two separate stories instead of one. In this intellectual division of labor, the origins of abolitionism belong to early Americanists, the transformation to students of the antebellum era, whose dramatic figures and episodes—William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, the gag rule and Bleeding Kansas—form the immediate backdrop to the Civil War. But two very different books—The Transformation of American Abolitionism by Richard S. Newman and The Slave Power by Leonard L. Richards—show the limitations of that approach.1

1

Each study hews to a well-defined research question, and each is ultimately limited by its narrow confines. Newman seeks to explain how and why American abolitionism became radicalized in the early nineteenth century. Richards examines how southern politicians came to dominate national politics from the Revolution to the Civil War. Taken together, the two works underscore that the political crises revolving around slavery and abolition in the generation before the Civil War had very specific origins in the period between the Declaration of Independence and the Missouri Compromise. Through their extended perspective on the new nation, we gain a clearer understanding of the multiple actors who shaped the conflict over American slavery and of the shifting ideological and political winds that swirled around the issue of slavery in the early republic.

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