| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jacqueline Bacon. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication.) Columbia: University of South Carolina press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 291. $39.95.
This book by Jacqueline Bacon studies the rhetoric of African-American men, African-American women, and white women abolitionists. It is an excellent and important contribution to studies of antebellum print discourse, abolitionist history, and the history and theory of rhetoric. Bacon assumes that a complete account of abolitionism requires more than an analysis of the dominant discourse produced by white men. In her view, this discourse does not merely reflect the circumstances of its privileged authors; it also gives white men undue credit and furthers the misapprehension that women and African Americans were passive recipients of abolitionist aims. Historians have followed suit, attributing the inception of militant abolitionism, for example, to William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator in 1831 rather than to the African-American Freedom's Journal launched almost four years earlier.	1
But the marginalized, convinced that they had to speak out on issues of such importance to their lives, were vocal throughout the course of the movement, although they had to maneuver around the reality of white male dominance. Their rhetoric cannot be studied with tools devised for dominant discourse. The marginalized had to practice various forms of subterfuge; they often addressed different audiences from those of mainstream abolitionism. Exhorting other African Americans, for example, or white women, they frequently incorporated such concerns as self-development and self-improvement, which seemed irrelevant to white male abolitionists but were crucially empowering for African Americans. Bacon's analysis develops a nuanced methodology drawing on the ideas of Kenneth Burke, Sacvan Bercovitch, Cheris Kramarae, Jean Fagan Yellin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston A. Baker, Jr., among others.	. . .

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