Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality. By Paul Goodman. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xxii, 303 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-520-20794-7.)

Paul Goodman, a thoughtful and thought-provoking student of the social roots of politics in the early republic, died prematurely in 1995. Of One Blood, his last book, reexamines the roots and defining characteristics of antebellum abolitionism. It has a three-pronged thesis. First, Goodman shows, it was northern free blacks who won the initial cadre of white abolitionists away from a gradualist form of antislavery (which was linked to colonization) to an immediate struggle for emancipation and equal rights for African Americans. This thesis is not new, but its fuller and more rounded elaboration here represents a valuable contribution. Second, Goodman continues, white abolitionists embraced the struggle against racism and racial discrimination when they realized that race prejudice was central to northern tolerance for southern slavery. This argument pays due attention both to the pervasiveness of northern society's racism and to the abolitionists' courageous struggle against it. The achievement of such a balanced treatment is a signal contribution at a time when so much recent scholarship depicts racism as a monolithic, universal, and unchanging factor in American history. . . .

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