| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Milton C. Sernett. North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. 2002. Pp. xxi, 369. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

More than a half-century after its publication, Whitney R. Cross's classic work, The Burned-over District (1950), continues to inspire new studies. With this book, Milton C. Sernett joins scholars such as Mary P. Ryan, Paul Johnson, Nancy Hewitt, and Curtis Johnson in examining the social and cultural history of central and western New York. Focusing on "a core area along the Erie Canal from Utica to Rochester" (p. xviii), Sernett describes the transformation of the Burned-over District, a region famous in the 1820s and 1830s for wave after wave of religious revivals, crusades, and enthusiasms, into North Star Country, an important center of the struggle for African-American freedom in the United States during the nineteenth century. 1

Like Cross, Sernett emphasizes the important role Charles Grandison Finney played in "preparing the ground" for New York abolitionism. The revivalist's emphasis on personal regeneration prompted converts to conclude "that there needed to be a national conversion on the question of slavery" (p. 23). As a result, they readily adopted the immediatist philosophy advocated by William Lloyd Garrison of Boston, which demanded immediate repentance and emancipation. But what began as a collaboration soon turned into a competition, as New York and New England abolitionists began to develop different strategies for abolishing slavery in the United States. The growing tension between the two groups is a leitmotif of Sernett's narrative. . . .

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