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Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination

2022; The MIT Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/tneq_r_00934

1937-2213

Lindsay DiCuirci,

American History and Culture

Nathaniel Hawthorne may have been haunted in the Scarlet Letter by “a throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments of gray,” but as Kenyon Gradert's lively book lays out, the puritans that populated the abolitionist rhetoric of Hawthorne's peers were warriors, revolutionaries, and zealots in the cause of righteousness. Indeed, Hawthorne's views remain “outliers” even if they have loomed large in the critical discourse surrounding the puritan legacy in the nineteenth century. This corrective, offered in the first endnote, lays the groundwork for the book's central achievement: to recover the version of puritan radicalism that antebellum thinkers instrumentalized in the cause of abolition. This recovery is necessary, Gradert argues, because critics today have wrongly “presumed [the puritans’] influence to be a conservative one” (10).The critical question that Gradert's book poses is this: Given their constant invocations of the puritans, what did New England abolitionists find revelatory and imitable about them? Often conflating “Puritans,” “Pilgrims,” and “Roundheads” in their allusions, abolitionists were less concerned with the finer theo-political points that separated these groups and more concerned with their “spirit,” their rebellious ethos in particular. Antebellum abolitionists found in this ethos an answer to the “sense that religion was now as spineless as it was civilized,” silent and subdued in the face of slavery (11). The puritan emigrants to New England are not as relevant to the Garrisonian abolitionists that populate this study as Oliver Cromwell and the revolutionary regicides. This book's puritans are more John Milton than John Cotton. And while the nineteenth century comes alive in Gradert's incisive analysis, its political and religious nuances sharply delineated, the seventeenth century is left comparatively indistinct, the titular Puritan Spirits, well, ethereal. Beyond the “usable past” that puritans might have provided, what did their specific theological convictions, exegetical principles, eschatology, social networks, worldview, pathos, or print culture lend to the righteous cause of abolition in the nineteenth century?Chapters one and two focus on how abolitionist men and women adopted a puritan model of righteous militancy, exposing an unresolved tension between “progressivism and chauvinism” (14). Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker, for instance, figured John Brown as “Cromwellian,” a comparison that embraced the “desire for spiritual heroism” through militant action (32). In the following chapter, Gradert traces how women writers like Maria Weston Chapman, Lydia Maria Child, and Julia Ward Howe co-opted this same masculinist model of activism to carve space for themselves in the abolitionist cause, a way to “reclaim [their] foremothers’ heroism for spiritual battle in a moral wilderness” (65). Gradert's discussion of Child's The Kansas Emigrants marks one of several important moments in this book of sustained attention to understudied texts. Here, though, I would have appreciated a closer look at the historiographical gymnastics that writers underwent to valorize Cromwell (ignoring, for instance, his treatment of Ireland) and create a kind of puritan soup of Roundhead rebellion and separatist spirituality, if only to help Gradert's readers understand the importance of historical obfuscation in these invocations of the “Puritan spirit.”Chapters three through five reveal the roles that print and belles-lettres played in reviving a Miltonian spirit of the free press alongside a “prophetic authority” intent on moving readers to right feeling and decisive action (99). Gradert's discussion of William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator reveals the extent to which he positioned slavery as “a threat to [white Northerners’] own cherished Pilgrim and Patriot tradition of a free press” (81). More than that, Gradert makes clear that channeling the puritan spirit gave the abolitionist press its teeth, even if critics of Garrison balked at his zealous gatekeeping of abolition's ways and means. Chapter four features the puritan poetics of James Russell Lowell and John Greenleef Whittier, the latter a life-long Quaker who nevertheless found in Milton an aesthetic and authorial model for doing prophetic work that pricked the public's moral imagination. Turning to the Stowes in chapter five, Gradert introduces the useful and evocative phrase “bands of reverence” in reference to the ways that Harriet Beecher Stowe in particular imagined a “harmonious social order for racial differences” (148). Presenting a new model of Christian charity, as it were, the Stowes sought to heal the rifts wrought by slavery through integrated, albeit Protestant, community care. Chapter six introduces a crucial corrective to the assumption that only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants could find affinity (or utility) in a puritan story. Gradert examines how Black abolitionists like Henry Highland Garnet, James McCune Smith, and Martin Delany harnessed what they saw as the culturally white short hand—the Mayflower—to hold slavery's apologists to account. They invoked the “Puritans as ammo” in the fight to call out the apathetic North, but they also harnessed the rhetoric of rebellion and the example of Cromwell to recruit Black soldiers in the Civil War (164). Gradert shows a keen and necessary attention to the vexed relationship that Black abolitionists had to Anglocentric historiography and to the ways that Black abolitionist discourse thrived outside of that narrow view of liberation.The conclusion covers Melville's Battle-Pieces and its (white) fantasy of fraternal repair following the war before moving, somewhat discordantly, to a reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as an exemplum of living with self-reliant conviction in a violent world. Gradert may have missed an opportunity here to revisit what he describes as the “long battle over our memory of the Puritans” as a way to reckon with what is forgotten (5). If we recognize New England's Anglo-American abolitionists as settlers, how does that change our reading of this referential, typological tradition, richly steeped in puritan war rhetoric? A puritan history of righteous holy war can only be trumpeted if a puritan history of actual war with, for example, the Pequots and Narragansetts is obscured. More broadly, how can scholarly work on the puritans and their legacies frankly reflect settler colonialism as the foundational phenomenon upon which origins myths are built? For even if puritanism's fiery convictions could be harnessed for radical ends—no less than the destruction of slavery—they could not live so vividly in the abolitionist imagination if they were not also washed in the oblivious waters of colonial amnesia. These observations notwithstanding, scholars interested in the nineteenth-century construction of the colonial past will find in Gradert's engaging book an important revelation about how saturated abolitionist discourse (and the print market) was with the figure of the revolutionary Puritan and how that figure, crafted in the abolitionist imagination, animated the zealous fight to end slavery.