Book Review

Canada and the United States

In her thoroughly researched and well-written biography of Parker Pillsbury, Stacey M. Robertson explores the personality and career of a nineteenth-century perfectionist whom scholars have long considered a crank on the fringe of the abolitionist movement. While Robertson acknowledges that Pillsbury was an eccentric who consciously developed an outsider identity early in life, she argues persuasively that he was also a sensitive visionary and a committed idealist who sincerely advocated social justice, often at great personal expense.	1
Robertson claims that, although Pillsbury labored as a field agent far removed from the Garrisonian headquarters in Boston, he exerted real influence on the radical abolitionists' strategy and ideology. Pillsbury, along with Stephen Symonds Foster, Abby Kelley Foster, and other American Anti-Slavery Society lecturers, mobilized a formidable grass-roots constituency in the West and in rural New England. Unfortunately, we never get a clear idea of who these converts were or how Pillsbury and other agents sought to connect them with the larger cause.	2
Robertson is more successful in exploring Pillsbury's odyssey from a youth characterized by poverty and limited educational opportunities to his role as a leading "come-outer" perfectionist who rejected organized religion yet remained committed to evangelical Christianity. Her study enlarges our understanding of the relationship between religion and abolitionism as well as the forces that led Pillsbury and other like-minded social activists to occupy the radical margins of American society.	. . .