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Review
| Growing Up Abolitionist: The Story of the Garrison Children, by Harriet Hyman Alonso. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. 409 pp. $24.95 paper, $80.00 cloth.
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| With Growing Up Abolitionist, Harriet Hyman Alonso has made a signal contribution to the historiography of reform movements by presenting an intimate portrait of the private world of the most prominent reform family in the nineteenth-century United States, a portrait which provides an excellent (and necessary) complement to the standard treatments of reform and activism in the public sphere. William Lloyd Garrison was the most prominent and radical voice in a number of antebellum reform movements (especially abolitionism), and the Garrison family, even as it expanded and came to include a larger circle of in-laws, reflected this steadfast commitment to principled and active reform. Most treatments of Garrison, however, ignore the fact that for Garrison (as with most reformers of the age) the distinction between "public" and "private" with regard to these beliefs and their practice barely existed, if at all. Alonso's well-researched and engagingly written work redresses this matter by providing a close study of the Garrison family, centered around the lives of the children of William Lloyd and Helen Garrison. The premise of Alonso's narrative is that only through an awareness of the Garrisons' family milieu that comprehends the variety of ways through which the parents' activism was transferred to their children, can one reach a full and nuanced understanding of the origins and effects of this reform impulse, and not just its public manifestations. |
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Alonso's narrative thus has an ambitious chronological scope, moving from the marriage of Helen and William Lloyd Garrison in 1834 to the death of Fanny Garrison, their daughter and the last surviving Garrison child, in 1928. Various chapters detail the growth of the family, first through the births of the Garrison children, then through their later marriages and the starting of their own families. The common thread running through these biographical treatments is an assessment of the results of the children's immersion in the larger context of social activism in which their father played a dominant role. Alonso traces the various ways in which the Garrison children shared their parents' commitment to causes such as abolitionism and women's rights, and she illuminates the intergenerational differences that arose around these themes as well. Perhaps the best example in this vein is her dissection of eldest son George's decision to enlist as an officer in an African-American unit during the Civil War, a decision which ran directly counter to the pacifist beliefs of his parents and his siblings. Alonso's careful examination of both George's motives and the reluctant acquiescence of the family in his plans is typical of the care and skill with which she addresses the multitude of subjects raised in her narrative. |
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From their commitment to the ultimately successful abolitionist movement, to their involvement in such issues as pacifism and civil rights, and their prominent role in a number of public venues, the Garrison children were key actors in many of the larger social and political dramas of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. Alonso presents these diverse causes through the eyes of the Garrison children and their families without neglecting the more private dimensions of their lives, such as their involvement in business activities, their interactions with each other throughout their adulthood, and perhaps most significantly, their shared understanding and commitment to the activist spirit in which they had been immersed since birth. |
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The main strength of the book is its extensive treatment of not only the immediate Garrison family, but those who married into it as well. This group includes such diverse figures as abolitionist daughters Ellen Wright and Lucy McKim and the German publisher and financier Henry Villard. Thus, while the Garrisons remain the point of reference for Alonso's work, through the use of this prosopographical approach she has produced a remarkably thorough study of the larger community of reformers as they lived, worked, and interacted with one another in both the antebellum and late-nineteenth century eras. In this regard, Alonso has succeeded in her efforts to join the public and private lives of the Garrison children to illuminate the true extent and impact of their reformist commitment, both within their family and upon their society. Readers of this journal with an interest in reform movements, their personal underpinnings, and their larger social contexts will find Growing Up Abolitionist an interesting and profitable study. Because of its scope and length, this work might not be the most appropriate for survey courses, but it would certainly be a worthy addition to more in-depth courses in social history, family history, the history of reform movements, and nineteenth century U.S. history |
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| Merrimack College |
Kevin Gannon |
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