| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence. By Susan M. Ryan. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xiv, 235 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8014-3955-8.)
The antebellum United States was awash with projects to do good. Indeed, a commitment to benevolence was vital to the Protestant middle class's confidence that it exemplified the nation's goodness. Grappling with this intense moral earnestness in the face of real and growing need, historians have long sought to explain this passion for benevolence without reducing it either to crude social control or to a naïve if genuine altruism.	1
To Susan M. Ryan, antebellum benevolence demands explication "as a central paradigm ... that provided Americans with ways of understanding, describing, and constructing their racial and national identities" (p. 5). Bringing together wide-ranging literary productions, activist accounts, and personal narratives, Ryan focuses on how this complex and contested paradigm reinscribed racial hierarchies even as (or because) it insisted on "some preexisting similarity and proximity" (p. 150) to the disadvantaged. Exemplified by "freedom from dependence and the capacity to aid others," benevolence itself, employed both by white reformers and by African Americans, constituted "an argument for citizenship" (p. 7).	. . .

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