Book Review

Canada and the United States

Born in 1821 to Connecticut Quakers, James Monroe grew up in a reform-oriented household. His first job was a three-year stint as a lecturer for the radical American Anti-Slavery Society. Health problems forced him to retire from lecturing, and the charismatic evangelical Charles G. Finney influenced him to pursue an education at Oberlin College in Ohio. Oberlin became Monroe's life-long home and, Catherine M. Rokicky argues, the location of his evolution toward moderate reform. During his student years he abandoned Quakerism for Congregationalism, adopted a more temperate form of antislavery, and began a family with his new wife, Elizabeth Maxwell. After lecturing for a short period, he accepted a teaching position at Oberlin and settled down.

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As antislavery politics heated up in the North, Monroe found himself increasingly pulled into local and state politics. He had previously eschewed antislavery third parties because he believed, with Finney, that politics inevitably diluted the moral strength of abolition. The increasing antislavery sentiment in the North and the emergence of the Republican Party in the mid-1850s, however, finally convinced Monroe to embrace politics. Elected as a Republican to the General Assembly in Ohio in 1856, he began a political career that would span more than three decades. He spent the remainder of the 1850s and the early war years immersed in Ohio politics, earnestly supporting antislavery measures and educational reform in the Assembly. Monroe worked closely with fellow reformers Jacob Cox and James Garfield and developed a reputation as an intelligent and practical negotiator. Despite the fact that Monroe chose not to participate actively in the dramatic "Oberlin-Wellington" fugitive slave rescue in 1858, or join the Union Army during the war, Rokicky defends Monroe as a sincere and admirable abolitionist during this period.

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