| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. By John Stauffer. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 367 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-00645-3.)

White abolitionists found Frederick Douglass quite to their liking. The Maryland runaway was as charismatic as any New England minister; to his genteel admirers, he had made the proper transition to freedom by assimilating into their culture. But there was another side to Douglass, best seen with his colleagues in the short-lived Radical Abolition party. Informed by the "Bible politics" advanced by John Brown, Gerrit Smith, and James McCune Smith, Douglass embraced violence as a means to reform, and together these four briefly regarded themselves as prophets determined to create a perfectionist heaven on earth. Uneasy with millennialist rhetoric, many scholars shy away from this aspect of Douglass's career, just as they too often isolate the deeply religious Brown from politics. But, by weaving these four lives together into an elegantly "braided" (p. 3) biography, John Stauffer illuminates their efforts to adopt a "black heart" and so create a new cultural standard that eliminated "whiteness," even among reformers, as a sign of moral superiority.

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